,c?v a 



LIBRARY I 




ME, GHIM'S DEEAM. 




NEW YORK: 

Copyright, 1878, by 

G. W. Carleton & Co., Publishers. 

LONDON I 8. LOW to CO. 
MDCCCLXXVin. 




TROW*S 
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING Co* 



INTRODUCTION. 




VIGOROUS youth, born replete with 
energy, courage, and will, grew up 
into sturdy manhood. Powerful in 
his physical strength, broad and far-reaching 
in his views, fervid and lofty in the purposes 
of his life, keen in his mental acumen, in- 
genious to the ablest degree, he gathered wealth 
and power without effort, and steadily gained 
each higher step of his ambition, tireless and 
strong. Suddenly there fell a thunderbolt 
upon him. It thrilled his frame with a 
bewildering jar, then passed forever as 
quickly as it came, leaving him scathless, 
whole, uninjured, but with livid face and 
congested heart, appalled, stricken in the 



yi INTRODUCTION. 

imagination with a profound sense of terror 
and despair and gloom, which years failed to 
remove. 

Likewise a nation arose: possessing a 
sound constitution to begin with, enterprising 
in the vigor of its youth, developing grandly 
to maturity, inspired by its own matchless op- 
portunity for expansion to singular greatness 
and usefulness- all its aspirations instantly 
quenched, its abounding energy thunderstruck 
and gone, years failing to restore it. 

Historians yet to be born will point the 
finger of commiseration back to this unfor- 
tunate point, and exclaim : "Ah / if that 
people at that time had seen themselves as 
a whole / had realized their united strength / 
and used it! But they sank into idleness! lost, 
lost, lost all those years, rather than gain, 
accumulate, prosper!" 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 




CHAPTER I. 

T was in the autumn of 1877. 

I had a dream. It must have been 
a dream. I thought I was living in 
a land of plenty, yet saw destitution around 
me in many homes. I was in a country 
blessed by nature above all other countries 
on the globe, yet thousands of persons were 
suffering for want of the necessaries of life. 
It seemed incredible. I looked more closely, 
to see if I was really among an enlightened 
people, or in a half-civilized region. I found 
I was not in famine-stricken India, but in this 
bright land of America, with a people sup- 



8 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

posed to be enjoying the benefit of civilization 
and modern improvements ; a country teem- 
ing with products, and furnishing the gold and 
silver of the world. Yet many persons were 
sorely in want. I thought of the universal 
prosperity that once existed here, though of 
course I was still dreaming. In this portion 
of my dream I imagined that only a few years 
ago this nation was enterprising ; no nation 
extant had built so much labor-saving ma- 
chinery. And now this vast enginery was in 
motion, and numberless human hands were 
idle. More work was the great want. Not 
less machinery, but more work. Work for this 
machinery and for these thousands of men 
supplanted by machinery. A gigantic enter- 
prise was in order. No slight enlargement of 
the existing industries, but a colossal undertak- 
ing an enterprise absorbing the labor of hun- 
dreds of thousands of men now yearning for 
work, 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 9 

My mind was soon fixed upon a certain 
wonderful plan of my own for the removal of 
the whole great trouble. It was all a dream, 
but such an extraordinary dream I must relate 
it, though it may fill an entire volume. 

I dreamed that away back in my youth I had 
conceived the building of a huge structure 
which the world needed, and all along through 
the years I had carefully considered the enter- 
prise, until now the opportune period had come 
for its grand fulfillment. It was too great a 
project to be undertaken in times when labor 
and capital were busily employed, before the 
era of mighty and multitudinous labor-saving 
inventions ; but every condition now was 
as favorable as possibly could be to the carry- 
ing out of this tremendous plan of mine. 

It was a vast engineering work, so differ- 
ent from any ever attempted or thought 
of by mortal man, that civil engineers would 
stand aghast at the mere proposal of it. 



io MR. GHIMS DREAM. 

And the building of the colossal structure 
I planned would employ the labor of 
so many thousands and thousands of men, 
and would present to the view of the world 
so gigantic an embodiment of usefulness 
when completed, that a contemplation of 
the achievement was among the sublimi- 
ties. And the reflection that this great 
enterprise must, by employing so much of 
the surplus labor, not only be a benefit to 
those employed, but restore the industrial 
balance which is now disturbed, thus re- 
viving business and checking the annual 
waste of millions through the non-per- 
formance of work which might be per- 
formed this reflection swept through me 
like an inspiration ! 

It was not an upstart scheme. I had 
been deliberating the subject so many years 
in silence, calmly awaiting the proper time 
for carrying out the project, there was 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. n 

nothing sudden in the enterprise itself. It 
was a fully matured plan, strengthened by 
contemplation and reasoning and observa- 
tion regarding this one especial purpose, un- 
til it had grown into a settled design. And 
now it was to be accomplished! I saw 
the lofty ambition of my life realized ! 
Wildly, intensely, ecstatically I dreamed ! 

Though I deplored the suffering which 
came from the great lack of employment, 
yet I saw that this dark state of things 
was the very condition essential to prepare 
the way for my great undertaking. It 
seemed providential. The more extensive 
and painful the distress, the more readily I 
should be able to remove the whole fell 
difficulty at one stroke, by furnishing count- 
less numbers of workmen employment and 
wages in building the mighty structure I 
saw in my mind's eye. And thus it would 
serve a doubly useful purpose. 



12 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

f 

Building the immense structure would 
furnish so much employment, workingmen 
would favor the enterprise unanimously. 
And as it would furnish employment to a 
vast amount of capital, also now idle, mon- 
eyed men would only need to be convinced 
of its practicability, and capital would flow 
to it in abundance. Therefore, to engage 
the interest of moneyed men in favor 
of the enterprise was the first proceed- 
ing and the only one necessary to in- 
sure its accomplishment. A great deal 
depends, thought I in my dream, upon the 
manner in which capital is sought to be 
enlisted in its favor. Many worthy schemes 
have failed for lack of skillful management. 
The right method will win, and the wrong 
method will not win, the confidence it de- 
serves. I will personally take my plan to 
some of the leading capitalists. (Oh, I 
wish I had a hundred million dollars my- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 13 

self !) I will go in person to the most 
affluent, one by one, and I will convince 
them all, beyond a fraction of a doubt, 
that this stupendous project of mine is 
destined to be accomplished, and that it 
will prove the most useful measure of ad- 
vance made in this century. I do not 
possess the command of stately language 
or fine rhetoric, but I can express myself 
clearly and practically. I do not expect 
or wish to convince immediately any one. 
I would not waste my time detailing a pro- 
ject to a man who would instantly agree 
with me upon an undertaking entirely new 
and so gigantic. He would as quickly 
change again to the opposite opinion. The 
deliberate, careful, gradual acceptance of my 
view, and then an enthusiastic maintenance 
of it, is the sterling kind of support I so- 
licit. I have been long years developing 
my own fervid conclusions regarding the 



U MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

matter, and cannot reasonably hope for a 
sudden brilliant conversion of the world 
upon it. If I go to a millionaire, and 
he patiently hears me a couple of hours, 
and then deliberately calls me an idiot, I 
shall put that millionaire's name on my list 
as one who will come out a staunch sup- 
porter of my enterprise in due time. And 
if the next millionaire to whom I unfold 
my plan accepts it eagerly without thought, 
I shall consider his name as that of a man 
not worth while putting on my list ; for, 
when the time comes to issue the stock, 
such a quickly-changing man will more 
likely be penniless than rich. I do not 
want impulsive, fickle men for the sup- 
port of this huge work. All would tum- 
ble, all would sink. I want solid, strong 
men ; men of weight ; men of breadth ; 
men of slow, sound judgment ; men who 
can deliberately take in a great idea, and 



MR. GfffM'S DREAM. 15 

calmly consider it on its own merits ; men 
of comprehensive grasp in their perceptions 
of the future ; men who steadily, through 
all panics, believe in progress ; men who 
are able to discern a great opportunity, and 
fill it with a great enterprise : these are 
the men of whom I seek audience. 

In my own city of Boston there were 
such millionaires, and a number elsewhere. 
Among the latter were two in the Empire 
State, whom I wished to consult first of all. 
These were William H. Vanderbilt and Jay 
Gould. I visited Vanderbilt first. I man- 
aged to obtain one whole evening with him, 
and, after a two hours' presentation of my 
grand plan, I found him as thoroughly con- 
servative and cautious as I had desired ; as 
skeptical regarding the feasibility of my 
transcendent undertaking as I had antici- 
pated. All was well. Had he ardently coin- 
cided with me in my huge notion in so short 



16 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

a time, never having thought of the great 
subject before, I should have passed away 
from his presence utterly dejected, feeling 
that the stoutest support I had hoped to 
win was, after all, but a mere weak, supple, 
fickle, poor prop. I should have vanished 
from his sight forevermore. But his cool 
unbelief in my project at the outset, his 
sturdy remark that he couldn't think of it, 
encouraged me in my opinion that he would 
think of it, that he was just the man to 
think of it, and the one man whose think- 
ing of it would lead to the surest material 
results. 

Vanderbilt was the mortal on whom 
my highest hopes rested and' centered. 
Around him a throng of moneyed men were 
to gather and unite in the vast enterprise 
I had planned for the good of the world ! 
The towering wealth of Vanderbilt was to 
rise to the apex of the glittering pile de- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 17 

voted to the high purpose of rousing Pro- 
gress from its four years' stupid slumber, 
and putting together a structure so massive, 
so useful, so thoroughly unique, that its 
construction would be one signal step for- 
ward in the march of mankind. 

I had met with the highest degree of 
success I deemed possible in that brief 
space, and was feeling in a perfectly satis- 
factory frame of mind at the end of my 
first visit to the man who was destined to 
become the most powerful supporter of my 
plan. 

Whatever his thoughts were at the time, 
however compassionate the smile upon his 
face as I left him, my faith in his ultimate 
acquiescence was complete. Before making 
a second visit, I allowed him a week to think 
of my plan, or not think of it, as he pleased, 
knowing that he must think of it, that the 
subject was too momentous for any person 



1 8 MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

who had once considered it a moment ever 
to forget it. The project at any time would 
be stunning; and at this particular time, 
when the welfare of millions of working- 
men directly, and all other persons indi- 
rectly, depended upon whether sufficient em- 
ployment was to be furnished or not, a use- 
ful enterprise involving the labor of so con- 
siderable a number was too important to 
be dropped as unworthy of consideration. 
Every man would think of it. The world 
over, it would be the unfailing topic of con- 
versation. And if I were to publish a little 
brochure upon it, a compendious statement 
of the subject in all its bearings, hundreds 
of thousands of copies would be sold ! For 
it was the most important subject before 
the people. 

Giving Mr. Vanderbilt a few days to 
think of it (in the intervals between the 
busy hours of railroad management press- 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. 19 

ing upon him), I decided to lay my plan 
open to the keen intellect of Jay Gould 
in the meantime. But when I went to see 
him he was out of town. 

I deferred attacking Jay Gould with my 
stunning scheme until I could catch him 
at home. 

I next called on Robert B. Roosevelt. 
I knew that Roosevelt would become an 
earnest advocate of my project. Roosevelt 
is a man of progress, in spite of his strange 
affiliations with the pull-back statesmen. 
His views on the labor question had always 
agreed with mine, and, though I had never 
yet mentioned to him my prodigious scheme, 
yet I was sure that after I had stunned 
him with it, and after he had considered 
it well, he would come out strongly in its 
favor, as every sensible man of progress 
would. Roosevelt especially, as Roosevelt 
is a singularly far-seeing, practical, level- 



20 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

headed man, as well as a wide-awake, go- 
ahead, nineteenth-century man. Some other 
members of Congress I knew were equally in 
harmony with the constructive spirit of the 
age, and I was confident of their patriotic 
support of my great enterprise if Govern- 
ment should be solicited to favor it. 

My interview with Roosevelt happens to 
be one of the haziest portions of my dream, 
but my next experience rolls before me 
clearly. 

The sudden acquaintance I formed with 
George Law is so vivid in my remem- 
brance that I shall not forget it for two 
hundred years. I happened to be walking 
by this great millionaire's house on Fifth 
Avenue, when the veritable Live Oak George 
himself happened to be entering. He was 
one of the millionaires whom I had intended 
to visit last and least, I felt so exceedingly 
dubious about ever trying to move such an 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 21 

invincible nature as I had understood his 
to be ; but some kind angel directed my 
steps to this particular spot at this auspi- 
cious moment, and impressed me that this 
was the very nick of time to tackle the 
six-foot possessor of six million dollars, and 
assured me that he should be one of the 
first to be won to my cause. 

Confidently turning toward this great mil- 
lionaire, I followed him up the steps, and 
accosted him just before he passed his 
threshold. 

" I have called to see Mr. Law. Perhaps 
he is not at home." 

" No, he's not. He'll be in in a moment, 
though," said he, stepping in. Evidently a 
mirthful mood was on him. 

" Now he is in, isn't he ?" I queried. 

"Yes. Who ain't you?" 

"The Czar of all Rhode Island. Can I 
see Live Oak George about two hours?" 



22 MR. GtffM'S DREAM. 

Had I said only about two minutes, I 
should have made a diplomatic fiasco. But 
two hours ! Two hours of his precious time ! 
The greatness of the request prevailed over 
his stern opposition. The strangeness of my 
suggestion rendered him more eccentric. He 
drew me in like a prodigal son. 

" Two hours !" he ejaculated, sinking upon 
a sofa, and pointing out a great arm-chair 
to me. 

" Are you a lightning-rod fiend ?" quoth 
he, suddenly rising. 

I quieted him down. 

" Or a book-peddling nuisance ?" roared 
he, jumping up again. 

I calmed the lion down once more. 

"Well, how much money did you s'pose 
you were going to borrow ?" 

" I have a grander purpose in coming 
here Mr. Law !" 

" Incredible ! I take it you are a tramp 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 23 

of some kind, high or low. Well, what is 
your grand purpose ?" 

For two hours I poured into this great 
man's ears the details of a plan so mighty 
in its scope that he was almost bewildered. 
Flinging himself upon the sofa, apparently 
overwhelmed by the pressure of something 
greater than he could bear, gazing up at the 
ceiling or glaring down at the floor in utter 
amazement, sometimes rousing himself and 
pacing the room for awhile, stopping now 
and then to fix his astonished eyes on me, 
silently hearing every word I spoke, and 
evidently willing to ponder deeply every 
idea I broached, though sometimes shaking 
his head in all directions, and holding it 
now and then between his hands and press- 
ing it hard, and then approaching me and 
feeling of me, to see if I were really a 
human being standing there and talking to 
him, or only a wild phantom of his brain ; 



24 MR, GHIM'S DREAM. 

dropping again upon the sofa confounded, 
yet wide awake and intently alert thus the 
two hours passed, bringing to me the sat- 
isfactory conclusion that he had listened to 
every word I said, that we had not once 
been disturbed by any one coming in, that 
I had transmitted into George Law's deep 
and level understanding, in regular order, 
the entire series of thoughts I had wished 
to plant there at my first interview, and 
now those ideas were sure of subsequent 
reflection. 

To depart immediately was the next step 
in my programme. To leave him to calm 
meditation, in silence and alone, while my 
grand project was glowing in his recollec- 
tion. 

" I will call again in a week," I quickly 
remarked, and was making an abrupt exit 
He detained me. 

" Call again now," he demanded. " Sit down. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM, 25 

Young man, you are perfectly astounding 
with that insane project of yours. Yet the 
plan looks reasonable. Of course it ain't 
reasonable ; of course it's only a madman's 
freak ; but I couldn't help listening, and 
you almost exploded me with that stupen- 
dous scheme. My head feels as big as an 
empty flour barrel. Couldn't you have told 
me half at a time ? Oh ! it is too much ! 
too much ! Ah ! I am going to die !" 

" So am I, some time. But it is no use 
whatever to die now, Mr. Law. Wait till 
you have helped to carry out this gigantic 
work, and seen it in successful operation." 

" If I live till then I'll be as old as 
Methuselah is," he pleasantly remarked. 

I anticipated seeing Live Oak George in 
due time as staunch a supporter of my huge 
enterprise as Vanderbilt himself. 

I left him for a week and interviewed 
other millionaires, 



a6 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

I have not yet told the reader what my 
great project was. I cannot inject it here, 
in a paragraph or two. It requires con- 
siderable space and time. I stipulated for 
two hours' time on presenting the subject 
to Mr. Law and Mr. Vanderbilt. The 
time which I expect of the reader for a 
similar purpose will begin when we reach 
another chapter. Meanwhile I wish to de- 
scribe briefly my experience with other mill- 
ionaires whom I converted to my scheme. 

Soon after Jay Gould returned to town I 
took myself into his presence, timing my 
call auspiciously, securing the desired two 
hours' interview. 

The ponderous George Law was the mill- 
ionaire I had last encountered ; here was a 
different kind of a bear to meet. Jay 
Gould is as little as George Law is big, and 
as far the opposite as can be in the impres- 
sion he makes upon you. The greater does 



MR. GfffM'S DREAM. 27 

not invite your approach, but when once 
within the radiation of his great heart you 
feel yourself perfectly at home, and you 
have a strong liking for the old gentleman. 
Jay Gould attracts, you in quite another 
way ; his diminutive body is topped with a 
mighty intellect, the glance of which from 
his keen eyes fascinates and lures you to- 
ward him, and holds you at a certain dis- 
tance from him. If you would approach 
nearer, you must gain access to his nature 
by addressing yourself to his head, and not 
to his heart Waste no sentiment here, 
but if you have any superb money-making 
enterprise in view, fortified by sound reason- 
ing and logical deductions, he will listen 
willingly. He discerns the foundation of 
things, and sees clearly if matters there 
are solid and substantial. It is a broad 
measure of pure mentality which controls 
him, with no animality involved in it to 



28 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

restrain it, or be restrained by it. If you 
have any scheme for his consideration, he 
knows by intuition whether it is worthy 
or unworthy. Whether it is feasible or not 
he will determine afterward, but with greater 
promptness than any other man. Of all 
the millionaires I interviewed, he was the eas- 
iest man to talk to, the quickest thinker, the 
readiest to grasp the far-reaching possibilities 
suggested by the great scheme with which 
I plied him. Regarding its feasibility, he 
was as cautious as man can be. But I 
wished him to be wary in that regard un- 
til he had deliberately thought over the 
subject at divers times and under various 
circumstances, that he might the more 
slowly and surely develop a strong, tena- 
cious, unflinching adhesion to the enterprise. 
He did not express an opinion for or 
against it during my first interview, and I 
was careful not to disturb the delicate poise 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. . 29 

by questioning him. I went my way, giv- 
ing him a week to revolve the scheme in 
his busy brain. 

Returning to my first millionaire at the 
expiration of a week from the time of my 
former call, I found Mr. Vanderbilt smiling 
and genial, as glad to see me as if I had 
been a two-tailed monkey or any other cu- 
riosity, and a very little more inclined to 
consider my monstrous scheme than he 
was before. 

" Your plan seems to me impracticable," 
said Vanderbilt, "but even if it were a 
feasible undertaking, I am not the man who 
should enter largely into it. My money is 
all in railroads. Idle capital is what you 
want to secure. Enlist that all in your 
enterprise, and then you can begin to try 
to go ahead. How could I do anything ?" 

"Sell out." 

He was astounded. But I meant exactly 
what I said, and I repeated it. 



30 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

" Sell out. Have done with railroads ! 
Embark your immense fortune in this huge 
enterprise looming up. Take hold of it 
now in its incipiency ; profit accordingly. 
Don't wait till the embryo has grown, and 
others control it. Manage it yourself. You 
have the first chance, the best chance if you 
avail yourself of the present opportunity. 
Sell out; let idle capital buy your rail- 
roads; throw your vast fortune into this 
new industrial enterprise. You will thus 
rise to a higher, broader business. And in 
it you will be honored as the pioneer of 
a new era. You can make it immensely 
profitable, too. You will be president of 
the company, the largest stockholder, the 
controller of affairs. Drop railroads, and 
take up " 

At this point we were interrupted by a 
useless annoyance in the shape of a caller, 
who, I vehemently remarked to myself, 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 31 

called upon an errand not one thousandth 
part as important as mine, whatever his was. 
When he was gone we resumed. 

" Mr. Vanderbilt," said I, " this depression 
in business and industry, with the great suf- 
fering caused by it, seems to me entirely 
needless. With all the deference I can feel 
toward the prevalent opinion that this is a 
necessary state of things, a healthy reaction 
from extravagance, coming down to hard- 
pan, knowing where we are, and so forth 
I cannot but look at the matter in a very 
different light. People in general do not 
view the situation as it really is. They 
think it complicated and beyond their capac- 
ity to understand, whereas it is perfectly 
simple and easy to understand by any one 
who can think. This is the practical way 
I view the matter: A few years ago we 
had real prosperity ; not fictitious, as many 
claim, but real prosperity. We can regain 



32 MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

it at once if we begin at once the right 
course. If these multitudes of mechanics 
and others now idle had employment in 
their respective mechanical and other occu- 
pations, their work would add many mill- 
ion dollars' worth yearly to the solid wealth 
of the world, and that would be prosperity 
again. The work they might do is not 
done, the wealth they would add to the 
world is not added ; the absolutely neces- 
sary work is all that is now being done ; 
no progress is being made ; a stoppage has 
come; this depression is not a healthy state 
of things. The decrease in business, and tke 
decrease in accumulation of wealth, bring 
hard times to the wealthy, and harder times 
to the poor. Yet the means for doing work, 
the means for accumulating wealth, are 
more numerous than ever before. We have 
stopped using the means. Is this a healthy 
state of things ? It is evident to me that 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 33 

industries must enlarge and multiply. The 
world is progressing. To check it is dan- 
gerous, and just that danger exists. Again 
we must advance, and speedily. Retrograd- 
ing does not improve our condition. 

" We have been retrograding four years. 
Look at the result. It is wholly unprofit- 
able. Retrograding is the wrong course. 
Were it the right course, we should see 
prosperity, accumulation, contentment, in- 
stead of what we do see. The fact that 
affairs have been steadily growing worse in- 
dicates that the people have been steadily 
going wrong, steadily trying to carry out a 
mistaken idea. Attributing the hard times 
to the kind of money in use, and to every- 
thing but the real cause, the fundamental 
principle of the whole matter is ignored. 
Labor-saving inventions have created a new 
era ! We must act accordingly. Machinery 
has wrought a revolution in the results of 



34 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

industry. We must adapt ourselves to the 
age of machinery, and make use of our 
immense facilities. Huge industrial enter- 
prises must be engaged in. Useful or use- 
less in themselves, they will start business, 
and thus awaken all industries to their nor- 
mal activity. The war kept us busy awhile ; 
rebuilding burnt cities kept us busy awhile. 
Meantime, labor-saving inventions were mul- 
tiplying as never before. And now, with 
immense mechanical power, and so little 
for it to do, activity has subsided, business 
has fallen flat. Work is needed ! a vast 
amount of work ! Start a great enterprise 
requiring the labor of a vast number of 
men, and Progress will resume its function 
of leading mankind onward to grander en- 
terprises still. The past has been a career 
of glorious progress, and shall not the fu- 
ture be also ? My project may seem to 
you now chimerical, ridiculous, impossible 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 35 

to carry out But every new step in ad- 
vance has been an amazing, stunning step. 
Every project has been incredible until ac- 
complished. And now shall the world stop? 
Stagnation is death. We must go on, enter 
upon new incredible works, each one 
greater than the last What shall be the 
next one ? There will be one ; what shall 
it be ? Here are a myriad of unemployed 
workmen aching to work, to construct some- 
thing, anything useful, some new embodi- 
ment of the world's progress, whatever it 
may be, however large or costly. The 
labor will be labor well bestowed, and the 
capital invested will do the noblest service 
capital ever performed." 

" You want to raise a hundred millions ? 
It is a large sum." 

" The Suez Canal cost over eighty mill- 
ions." 

" How much ?" 



36 MR. GJTSM'S DREAM. 

" The exact cost was $80,893)665. My 
project calls for a sum not very much 
larger, and its usefulness will be immeasura- 
bly greater!" 

Our talk was protracted, and repeated 
with variations, at hebdomadal intervals, un- 
til in a few weeks I had the satisfaction of 
seeing Vanderbilt thoroughly convinced in 
favor of the gigantic enterprise I had 
planned. He sold over fifty million dol- 
lars' worth of his railroad stock, gradually, 
privately, and realized its full value. Then 
he earnestly entered upon the work of 
chartering the new company for the new 
business, with a hundred million dollars of 
capital as a basis, of which he furnished 
more than half, and thus gained a control- 
ling interest. 

In the meantime I had been drumming 
up custom from other millionaires, persuad- 
ing them to go into the enterprise with 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 37 

their mites, some five millions, some four, 
some two, some only one little million. I 
pursued the same general method in con- 
vincing each, varying the details of my 
operations according to the whimsical char- 
acteristics of the different men, but success- 
ful with every one. I visited August Bel- 
mont, the Lorillards, Fred. Stevens, Moses 
Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, James Lennox, 
Mr. Kernochan, Mr. Rhinelander, and all 
the leading millionaires of New York who 
were at home. 

Alexander T. Stewart was dead, but Alex- 
ander Stuart was living and worth five mill- 
ion dollars. I called upon the great sugar 
refiner at his time-honored place of abode 
in the lower part of New York, and found 
him a pleasant old bachelor, willing to lis- 
ten to my project, and after several inter- 
views a believer in it, though strongly op- 
posed to new-fangled notions in general. 



38 MR. CHIMES DREAM. 

Whatever was really and indisputably use- 
ful he believed in, and for that reason he 
could not but admit that my plan was 
deserving of success. He gave it solid 
support in the form of four millions he 
subscribed to the stock, and put a provis- 
ion in his will whereby in case of his death 
that money could not be withdrawn from 
that purpose. Having no family of his own, 
he willed that amount to me. I being 
thoroughly committed to the great enter- 
prise, of course I would put the four mill- 
ions into it, while any one else might or 
might not. The legacy in prospect was 
such an entirely unexpected honor to me, 
that when I was first informed of it I was 
too deeply moved to say a word, and could 
only silently think how gratefully I should 
revere his memory as long as he lived, 
and how filially I should write and publish 
his biography after he was dead. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 39 

I had some difficulty in convincing this 
gentleman in the first place that many 
mechanics are out of employment and in 
poverty through no fault of their own. 
Self-made millionaires are so apt to suppose 
that any man could have been equally suc- 
cessful. Successful men are so unwilling to 
believe that there are men of less capacity. 
It was the capacity of this man, together 
with the Scotch-Irish force which runs in 
his veins, that enabled him to be so emi- 
nently successful. 

Many have wondered why a man of such 
immense property has never married. He 
told me the reason one day, in strict con- 
dence, and so I will repeat it. The great 
sugar refiner said his whole life had been 
among sweet things ; and even when he was 
a boy, peddling sugar -candy, he became so 
satiated with sweet things he could never 
afterward love anything sweet. 



40 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

The other great sugar refiner, his brother, 
Robert L. Stuart, a few years older than 
my great benefactor, I found dwelling in a 
magnificent residence on Fifth Avenue, 
beguiling the leisure of his threescore 
years and ten in sumptuous style. He, 
too, has acquired between five and six mill- 
ions ; and he, too, after several pleasant in- 
terviews, entered solidly into my great en- 
terprise, putting down his name for four 
millions. 

I was sure of Peter Cooper. A progressive 
man of infinite versatility ; the designer and 
builder of the first locomotive constructed 
in America; successful in every business un- 
dertaking of his life so far (though he is only 
eighty-six) ; a man who has made money 
as grocer, coachmaker, cabinetmaker, and in 
various greater capacities ; the originator of 
the anthracite puddling process; the builder 
of immense ironworks ; the owner of a 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 41 

glue factory ; the president of a great 
mining company ; an enterprising philan- 
thropist, always thinking of the poor, and 
spending freely to promote the welfare of 
the industrial classes I knew that the 
founder of Cooper Institute would not re- 
quire urging to support a useful enterprise 
that would give employment to a vast 
number in pressing need of it. Even 
from him I did not look for an imme- 
diate indorsement of my stunning scheme. 
I expected the genial old gentleman's blue 
eyes would stare in astonishment at me, 
and so they did. I anticipated that his 
kindly and benevolent visage would work 
itself up into something like a sneer to 
begin with, and so it did. I guessed he 
would double his tall form with mirth at 
my incredible project, and shake the whiten- 
ing locks of thin brown hair which hang 
to his shoulders, and bend his fragile neck 



42 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

again and again to gaze down at me over 
his noble Roman nose, in perfect astonish- 
ment at the gigantic enterprise I origi- 
nated, and so he did. The great originator 
of enterprises himself was more completely 
taken aback by the magnitude of mine 
than some of the other millionaires I con- 
fronted with it ; but I knew he only needed 
time to think it over, and Peter Cooper 
would come out one of my most enthu- 
siastic advocates. In due time he threw 
his whole soul into the worthy enterprise, 
and threw in several million dollars besides. 
" My dear Ghim ," said he, " if it wasn't 
for my glue factory, now, I would put in 
a million more ; but I must stick to my 
glue." 

Joshua Montgomery Sears, of Boston, 
the ardent young millionaire, with the fer- 
vor of twenty-two bright summers and 
love's young dream besides thrilling through 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 43 

him, was about to take his lovely bride on 
a trip to Europe. At present he was 
travelling in this country. The day before 
his departure from these shores I had a 
long and uninterrupted interview, and directed 
the surplus force of his youthful ardor to 
the contemplation of the vast enterprise I 
had in mind. It was a fitting season, 
for during his voyage he contemplated the 
project unceasingly ; and he mailed me an 
earnest letter the day he arrived out, declar- 
ing he would put every dollar of his sev- 
eral millions into my thoroughly useful un- 
dertaking. 

William Emerson Baker, the eccentric sew- 
ing-machine millionaire, of Ridge Hill fame, 
required but three efforts on my part to con- 
vince him of the wisdom of putting four mill- 
ions into my magnificent enterprise. On the 
day of my first visit to this merry genius at 
his vast estate in Wellesley, Mass., he was 



44 MR. GHIWS DREAM. 

seriously contemplating through his eye-glass 
the intention of putting another million into 
a new piggery, the recently-built luxurious 
edifice having become carelessly soiled by 
the tenants. They had rooted up the Brus- 
sels, tarnished the satin-covered sofas they 
had sat in, tipped over the rosewood chairs 
in itching to scratch their backs, made 
havoc with the downy feather beds and 
lace curtains, reared up and swept off all 
the articles of vertu from the malachite 
mantelpieces, walk>wed like sixty in the fire 
in the fire-places, thus blackening even the 
snowy white cornices and the orrtate fres- 
coes, and in every way injuring the mar- 
ket value of their palatial mansion. The 
owner of these unruly slaves was cogitat- 
ing and deciding whether to build them a 
new habitation, or exchange them for edu- 
cated hogs. I persuaded him to cut them 
up into little square pieces and put them 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 45 

into bean-pots in his Institute of Cookery, 
and invest all his extra millions of dollars 
in the grand project my own unique genius 
had originated. The pigs when defunct com- 
prised a larger pile of comestibles than could 
be devoured at his enormous grange at 
Wellesley and his Chester Square residence 
in Boston put together ; so he issued in- 
vitations to a splendid funeral, and had all 
the Governors of all the States, and all the 
people of the Southern States who hap- 
pened to be north of Mason and Dixon's 
line, gathered at Ridge Hill Farm to par- 
take of pork and beans. A great deal was 
left over, sent into Boston, and given away. 
Boston will have pork and beans for years 
to come. 

I called upon all the principal million- 
aires in Boston and vicinity, one by one, 
and secured them all in favor of my stu- 
pendous undertaking. 



46 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Charles Francis Adams, dwelling a few 
miles out, on his ancient estate in Quincy, 
Mass., put three millions into my great pro- 
ject. This rich man's sons all became advo- 
cates of the enterprise, aiding it by the rich- 
ness of their wit, their energy, and their 
numbers. 

A remarkable coincidence occurred one 
day. I was at home, and my thoughts were 
running upon the destitution and misery of 
thousands of persons in my family (the 
great human family), especially the poor 
circumstances of various persons whom I 
happened to know personally. I was think- 
ing of the suffering I had seen them ex- 
perience from day to day, and how painful 
it was to me to look at my own poverty 
and find that I had not the means to re- 
lieve them, and hardly knew how I was 
going to get bread myself. Many a time 
I had thus meditated sadly on the wretch- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 47 

edness I knew existed around me, seeing 
it myself and partaking of it myself, and 
knowing that one thing would remove it, 
just one thing would put happiness in many 
spots where now unhappiness lingers, and 
that one thing was money. I was ponder- 
ing on my urgent need of money when 
lo, there came to my poverty-stricken home 
the greatest blessing in disguise that ever 
fell to my lot. It was a pair of twins ! 
Here I was, sunk in the very depth of 
pecuniary want, having been unfortunate in 
business, and having used up all the few 
little dollars I had remaining for the pur- 
pose of making that highly important jour- 
ney among the millionaires in New York 
and elsewhere, and now I had come home 
with the exultation of knowing that I had 
been successful and my colossal enterprise 
was under way, but at the same time with 
the dire feeling that I knew not where- 



48 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

withal I could purchase bread which comes 
so handy when hungry, and pay the little 
rent of the little room which is so much 
more convenient to occupy than living out- 
doors. By and by, when I had carried out 
my grand plan, everything would be lovely 
for everybody, but the interim looked dubi- 
ously empty for me. At this awful juncture 
of affairs I was blessed with that sudden 
pair of twins ! They came so unexpectedly, 
my joy was such that I can scarcely de- 
scribe it. But I shall never forget it. I 
think no man ever received a pair of twins 
with more astonishment or with feelings 
more intense and deep than were mine in 
that exceedingly depressed state of my 
finances. Yet I welcomed the twins with a 
fondness as real and as passionate as ever 
mortal experienced ; and I solemnly declared 
that they were Heaven-sent gifts. I am not 
a married man ; that pair of twins came 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM: 49 

to me by mail ; they were sent by Peter 
Cooper and George Law, and consisted 
of two twelve-thousand-dollar checks! That 
was a pair of twins worth having ; they 
were useful to a poor man ; they were worth 
caressing. The coincidence I noticed was 
that they came together, and were just the 
same size. Both of them were the same 
size. The wonder was, not that the great 
philanthropist, Peter Cooper, divined my 
needs, and sent me a few thousand dollars, 
for there was nothing remarkable or unnat- 
ural in that; nor that the great heart of 
George Law moved him likewise, for there 
was nothing wrong in that, and nothing sur- 
prising; but that both happened to do the 
same thing at the same time this was the 
wonderful coincidence. They never made a 
wiser investment. That money did an im- 
mense amount of good. It enabled me to 
continue with greater advantage my indefa." 



50 MR. GfffM'S DREAM. 

tigable efforts in behalf of the huge pro- 
ject I had set on foot, as it supplied me with 
the means of going and coming wherever 
I desired, without the oppressive draw- 
back of impecuniousness. Furthermore, it 
enabled me to begin to eat three square 
meals a day. Better than all, it was instru- 
mental in brightening sad faces my heart 
had ached in beholding day after day ; in 
removing some who had been tied by stress 
of circumstances to unhealthful occupations, 
and were dying down ; in relieving necessi- 
ties I had been forced to witness, power- 
less to relieve till now, wtfere want was so 
extreme that tears of sadness were changed 
to tears of gratitude by a five-dollar bill. 
It often started my own tears when I looked 
upon the change wrought the happy homes 
that had been dreary, the cheerful faces that 
had been woe-begone, the hopeful hearts 
that were recently in despair. And the 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 51 

credit of it all was due to Peter Cooper 
and George Law. If they had not manu- 
factured and sent me that pair of twins 

But I must return to the main subject, 
the magnificent plan I had conceived for 
the advancement of mankind one single 
step. I fancied that when that important 
step I suggested had been taken, and as a 
result of my labors to that end I had some- 
how become a millionaire myself, twelve- 
thousand-dollar checks would seem paltry, 
and I should be giving instead of receiv- 
ing these little munificences. 

A session of Congress was approaching, 
and I went to Washington, not to lobby 
any claim through, for I had secured else- 
where all the influence my project needed ; 
I had no favors to ask of Congress ; I 
went there for my own diversion, as a re- 
laxation from the earnest endeavors I had 
been making among millionaires ; and at 



5* MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

the same time to edify upon that particular 
topic of mine any of the great ones of 
the earth whom chance might throw in my 
way at Washington. 

Meeting President Hayes one day in La- 
fayette Square, I expounded to him the 
great subject which filled my mind ; and 
calling upon him a few times afterward 
at his house when he did not happen to 
be travelling in a little while I numbered 
him among the earnest believers in my 
scheme. President Tilden was travelling in 
Europe, but during his absence President 
Hayes was assiduously performing the du- 
ties of Chief Magistrate of this country, 
being constantly in every part of it. Not 
waiting for President Tilden's return, I sent 
him a cable dispatch containing an inkling 
of my colossal scheme. It brought him 
home by the next steamer. I soon won 
his confidence in favor of my gigantic en- 
terprise. He put a barrel of money into it. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 53 

Looking down from the Senate gallery 
one day upon the famous hyacinthine lock 
which tumbles gracefully adown the brow 
of New York's intellectual giant, I be- 
thought me of going down into the lobby, 
sending in my card, and calling him out 
for an interview. But the wild animals 
down in the pit before me were suddenly 
stirred into animation by the intense inter- 
est of some utterance made among them, 
and the Utica lion was glaring so fiercely 
at the Georgia lion, the occasion was inop- 
portune ; I waited till the following day. 
All was quiet then. Gordon was not rous- 
ing them ; Edmunds was not stinging 
them ; Patterson was not grilling them ; 
Morrill was lulling them. There was Sen- 
ator Conkling, cleaning his finger-nails, as 
usual. I was close to the Diplomatic 
gallery, just above him. I glanced across 
the Chamber before going down into the 



54 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

lobby. Over in the Reporters' gallery 
were various journalists. Leaning over 
the middle was one who always attracts 
attention, and always ought to. He is the 
ablest thinker and writer that walks into 
the Senate Chamber, above or below. His 
practical insight, of matters in general and 
matters in particular, surpasses that of a 
dozen Senators combined. His power of 
penetration is marvellous. He is a keen 
ferret, a detective whom you need not 
hope to escape if you are a government 
official and any tendency to fraud lurks 
within you. He is peculiarly witty withal 
when the mood is on him. He is the 
journalist who looks at you so seriously 
and writes about you so facetiously. Meet- 
ing him one day as he came out of 
Welcker's, I took him up to Wormley's, 
and while we were gorging ourselves, I 
filled his ears with the narration of my stu- 



MR. QHIM'S DREAM. 55 

pendous plan, repeating the dose at inter- 
tervals subsequently, until Donn Piatt was 
convinced. He threw the whole force of 
his " gigantic intellect," as he jestingly calls 
it (speaking a true word in jest), into 
a leading editorial in his paper, committing 
The Capital in favor of my magnificent 
and undeniably useful project. 

But on this day the powerful gladiator 
from the Empire State was my prey. The 
doorkeeper took in my card, and Senator 
Conkling did me the honor to appear. 
We stepped into the Vice-President's pala- 
tial room, and I assured the Senator that 
my business was of such transcendent im- 
portance I must crave a couple of hours 
of his leisure when at home ; and I asked 
him to appoint the time. 

" But what a big man you are !" was 
my first exclamation. " I had no idea 
you were so big !" 



56 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

" Yes, I have been called great," he quietly . 
remarked. 

" You don't look half so tall and broad- 
shouldered in the Senate as you do out 
here." 

" I am among great men in there," he 
explained. 

" That's the reason," said I. " Out among 
common-sized men a Senator's magnitude 
shows itself. And now I see why you are 
so often called a dandy. Fine clothes and 
a blue necktie don't look well on a large 
man. Only on dapper little men. In the 
Senate Chamber, among so many large 
men, you don't look large, and you don't 
appear foppish. But outside " 

" Yes," interrupted the Senator, in his 
pleasant, yet firm, strong way, " I have 
been called out at sundry times by original 
geniuses, but you are the first to draw 
me from senatorial duties to inform me 



MR. GHIWS DREAM. 57 

how my personal appearance strikes you. I 
conjecture you have been reading a ladies' 
magazine, or wasting valuable time with a 
dilettante, or gossiping with a man-milliner. 
If your business with me is now concluded, 
our interview ends." 

" I want two hours," said I. " I have a 
colossal plan to unfold to you, in which 
your great city of New York is specially 
concerned." 

After some further conversation, I secured 
the appointment I desired, met him at his 
house at the hour designated, held various sub- 
sequent interviews, and was finally successful 
in polarizing all the atoms of that entire 
mighty globe of cerebral substance in the 
right direction regarding my scheme. 

In a similar way, and with similar results, 
I attacked a number of the leaders of 
thought at the capital. 

The broad, judicial mind of Chief Jus- 

3 



58 MR. GfflM'S DREAM. 

tice Waite became deeply enamored of the 
project. 

Even the serene and lofty complacency 
of the venerable Fernando Wood bent to 
consider my sweeping measure of progress; 
and, waving its hoary conservatism away 
behind it, entered with dignified enthusiasm 
into the rising effort of human nature to 
advance. 

But I must admit that not every mem- 
ber of Congress was or ever could be con- 
vinced of the usefulness of this or any 
other progressive step. There are men 
who have no conception of progress; and to 
talk with such men upon new and great 
themes would be a waste of time. They 
are constitutionally predisposed to favor in- 
activity rather than progress, to frown upon 
forward movements" and let stagnation ruin 
a people. Such men I did not attempt 
to convince. I did not seek an interview 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 59 

with Randall in the House, or Bayard in 
the Senate, though the former comes from 
the great State which furnished a stentorian 
advocate of my enterprise in the person of 
the famous Pig Iron Kelley, and the other 
represents a little State which produced 
that incomparable letter-writer, George Alfred 
Townsend. The latter became a solid 
supporter of my forthcoming measure, and 
eloquently rounded many a pithy period con- 
cerning it over the signature of " Gath." 
It was not so difficult to convince him at 
last as to catch him at first. He was in 
New York one day, New Orleans the next, 
Saratoga the next, St. Louis the next, Wash- 
ington the next, and had an engagement to 
be in San Francisco the next. I caught 
. him in the only place where he was ever 
quiet on an express train. For subsequent 
interviews, I had no difficulty in finding 
him on an express train. This soul-stirring 



60 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

journalist committed himself thoroughly and 
strongly in favor of the gigantic plan I 
had marked out. Journalists all favored 
it. At first, of course, they all ridiculed it ; 
but after due consideration they all edged 
around to the sensible side. Newspaper 
correspondents harped upon it, and shortly 
the idea was broadcast. 

Perley considered its influence upon the 
Republican party. 

Jay Charlton dived into its technique. 

Poiein wrote up its profitableness as a 
speculation. 

Redfield was sure it would not break 

the solid South. 

\ 
Boynton prophesied what its effect would 

be, from the Gulf to Alaska. 

Eugene Lawrence was disappointed at not . 
finding anything dangerously Ultramontane 
in the scheme. 

Every one treated it in his own special, 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 61 

characteristic way, and thus it was analyzed 
completely and advertised thoroughly. 

Before narrating further how my great 
project fared, I will in one long chapter 
describe what the enterprise was, and how 
I came to think of it 



62 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 




CHAPTER II. 

WAS born upon the sea. The 
billows were very angry at the time. 
They dashed against the vessel, and 
they made such a terrible ado about it how 
could I ever forget it? 

My father was a sea captain, and he always 
kept his little family with him. He and my 
mother were one. One cannot well be in 
two places at the same time. They steered 
together in their course through married life, 
keeping clear of its breakers, and holding to 
the same latitude and longitude so closely 
that the smallest angry wave could not roll 
between them. And so it happened that I, 
their only child, was born upon the ocean. 



MR. GlflM'S DREAM. 63 

I was rocked in a crystal cradle one 
hundred feet wide and forty feet deep. It 
has rocked many persons into their long 
sleep. 

My infancy and youth were mainly spent 
upon the restless waves. 

When I dive down deep into memory, 
and bring up to the light a few of the old- 
est impressions I have stowed away there, to 
look them over and feel them again I find 
myself standing on a wooden thing which 
goes by the name of a ship; but the "good 
ship," as they call it, is in a woful plight, and 
all the matters around are horribly mixed ; 
nothing I can see or feel has any stability: 
there is no settled bottom or top to any- 
thing; whatever is up one minute is down 
the next ; the ship is a mere wooden play- 
thing for some monster, and all the frag- 
ments of the vast sea around it are swinging 
hither or surging thither, rushing on with 



64 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

resistless force. The howling winds and the 
roaring waters combine to render the situ- 
ation awful! I lose my hold of the door, 
and go sliding around on the slippery deck, 
coasting from point to point, until I clutch 
something; and even then I see no place 
of safety in the entire universe, for nothing 
will keep still! I look up, and there I see 
a tremendous bank of water approaching, 
coming on so steadily, so firmly, so mightily, 
that I expect when it gets here it will over- 
whelm little me and all hereabouts. I can 
feel the ship going down, down, and I can 
see that gigantic ridge of water coming on, 
on, until its foot reaches the vessel, giving 
it such a kick that it tips the little wooden 
thing half over and sends it up, up, up, 
as though we were going up into Heaven 
this very minute! Away up on the top 
of a ridge of water we are lifted, at the 
mercy of a single wave, and as the pal- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 65 

try wooden thing sways over the crest to 
the other side we begin to go down again 
into that awful chasm, for the water rolls 
away from beneath and lets us down, 
down, down, so low, so far, so long, that 
it seems as though we were to keep on 
going down forever; but another rover, like 
the former, comes and gives the ship an- 
other kick, which sends it part way over 
and up again, up, up, up to that dizzy 
height from which I look around in 
all directions down on wrathy Neptune, 
who is opening his mouth and roaring far 
and wide. The air appears to be moving 
in all possible directions, and moving 
in all possible haste, but down from the 
heavens upon a sudden comes a gust of 
wind with greater velocity ; and as it sweeps 
the cordage through and through, it splits 
the maintop-gallant sail from yard to yard, 
and carries away the main-royal entire, giv- 



66 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

ing it a blow that sets it flying high and 
away. Furiously another squall comes on, 
and every sail is put to the severest test 
of its tension by a mad current of air which 
reaves the vessel of everything willing to 
go before it ! In half the twinkling of 
an eye it snatches off the weakest remain- 
ing sail, wrenches another from its clew- 
lines, and smacks the gaily flying streamers 
into shreds ! Gust after gust swoops from 
the raging fluid above us, down *to the 
raging fluid beneath us, creating havoc in 
every yielding obstacle to its course, and 
dashing upon the sea to expend its power 
there in goading Neptune up into a whiter 
heat of fury ! Every downward gust is a 
reckless plunge of air which plows yet 
deeper into the roughened surface of the 
ocean, raising a billow to sweep away the 
ruins created by its impetuous career among 
the older waves, meeting the newer undula- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 67 

tions, clashing sometimes into a heterogene- 
ous mixture, all rolling away in confusion, 
sometimes compounding into one deep and 
mighty surge. Heavy-looking clouds are 
now rumbling in the distance, and tumbling 
along pell-mell in their ardor, firing up and 
shooting each other through and through, 
bellowing in tones which echo long and 
loudly from the broad ocean beneath. 
Squalls thicken and darken with the rain 
which now comes pouring from the over- 
hanging firmament of awful blackness upon 
the underlying fundament of awful rough- 
ness. Oh ! how it rains ! Yet the drench- 
ing water from that source is welcome, for 
it washes the deck of the drenching spray 
that comes from the filthy swash of the 
sea. But the wild activity of the wind is 
ruinous. Fearful and only fearful is the 
situation now, for peril and only peril is 
felt Ah ! sad news ! " Man overboard !" 



68 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

is shouted from the bow. Instantly the 
cry is taken up, hoarsely repeated over the 
deck, and rung out at every point in the 
rigging, from the flying-jib to the spanker- 
boom. I see a man hurrying from the 
quarter-deck with a rope, and bending over 
the stern ; another goes to the larboard 
bulwark, and one to the starboard ; while 
others are hurrying down the ratlines to 
man a boat. Every effort is made to re- 
cover poor Jack. But the luckless fellow, 
in losing his hold of the bowsprit, lost his 
hold of the entire globe, slipped away from 
earth into unknown regions, and will never 
close his fingers upon a rope again, even a 
vessel's shroud. And any one else on board 
might pass off in a similar way. The good 
ship itself might go to destruction with us 
all. This is a shaky place for a man to try 
to live. After much groaning of the discon- 
tented thing called a ship, the violence of 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 69 

the storm abates, and the wooden article on 
which we are enduring life goes on less 
noisily and somewhat less disagreeably. The 
fitfulness of the wind is gone, but the 
water is never still, and therefore the ship 
is never quiet. I see the mighty surges of 
the ocean rolling toward me day after day, 
and I feel them rocking me in my cradle 
night after night, with the dreariest monot- 
ony from week to week, until a vague vis- 
ion or hope of something firm and solid in 
the world, somewhere, grows into a splendid 
reality, and looms up in the horizon to 
meet the very yearnings of my instinct. 
Land ! I land in Heaven ! It is a place 
of such solidity and grandeur, affording 
such new delight, I call it Heaven. There 
are so many calm and lovely objects every- 
where, land is a perfect Heaven to this 
little four-year-old me. Hither and thither 
in Heaven I rove as well as my sea-legs 



70 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

will allow. It is -a delightfully hard road 
to travel. They call it a pavement ; I 
call it the deck. I test the countless 
articles around me ; I put my hands upon 
them, and my finger-ends partake of the 
satisfaction I feel to find that all these 
queer things are real, substantial, tangible. 
It is the veritable Heaven of my intense 
longings, and I enjoy it as no one born 
and brought up on the land of the earth 
could. As I walk this deck I am so 
pleased I laugh at every step. It is such 
a queer deck to my unaccustomed feet I 
hardly know how to tread. I expect it 
to come up, but it fails me ; I look for it 
to go down, but it is I who go down. I 
jump up and try it again until I feel 
squeamish ; then I swing my hips and 
surge along till I am all right again. Every 
scene is delightful from its novelty. But 
the strange quiet investing all is amazing. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 71 

The elements here are numberless, and yet 
how little clashing. There is now and then 
a jar, a slight rumbling, a curious trembling, 
an earthquake they call it ; but that is 
soon over, and all is quiet and peaceful as 
before. The people living here, however, 
seem agitated when they are taken and 
shaken by the main beneath them ; but 
what would be their feeling if this deck 
on which they walk were always rearing 
or plunging, and their houses always ca- 
reening ? How would they like to live 
where the foundation of one's abiding-place 
is nothing but water, into whose fatal depths 
an unseen rock at any time might sink 
their house and all its contents? I won- 
der that people here do not enjoy their 
homes without exception, for it seems to me 
they have nothing to make them unhappy. 
I hear a multitude of different sounds which 
I cannot recognize, and I listen eagerly to 



72 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

them all ; yet persons who have always 
dwelt here say they hear nothing; and then 
they say, " Yes, we hear plenty of noise." 
To me it is a continual mixture of pleasing 
sounds, albeit a queer species of quiet some- 
how pervades everything here. It is not 
silence, but quiet, a strange immovableness 
of things. I do not find a hammock 
swinging anywhere, and the bunks are the 
flattest things a young sailor ever saw. I 
become acquainted with youngsters of my 
age, and they all ask me why I waddle 
instead of walking as they do. I don't 
know. But I think a while, and I tell them 
that if they come on to my deck perhaps 
they will waddle. I see some pretty little 
boys wearing one-legged pants, and I don't 
know what to make of them. I think they 
are angels, but I am told they are girls. We 
never had any on board our ship. I see 
some bigger and more robustious angels, 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. 73 

too. My father says they remind him of 
my dead mother. And I see some scrawny 
angels, but I can't help liking them. I 
am so happy I like everything I see or 
hear here. Oh, these people who live on 
land are blest ! blest ! or would be if they did 
but know it, if they would only think so. 
After a while my father and I, with some 
other folks, go out of this hard, solid place, 
where the ground and the houses stand so 
still, and where so many people are bustling 
about and making all sorts of music we go 
from here way out upon a broader deck, 
where there is not a man to be seen for 
many a cable's length. Out here the deck 
is painted green, and it feels inexpressibly 
soft and nice. What a calm prevails! There 
is no music here. It is solid quiet. I 
never knew there could be such silence. 
It is absolutely serene. Oh, this is a queer 
place, but it is perfectly delightful. Half a 



74 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

knot to windward I see some big people 
with horns. Those men are so large 
they have four legs to stand on, and carry 
an extra leg hung behind. They are the 
funniest persons I ever saw aboard anything. 
Some of them are kissing the soft green 
deck ! What queer folks live out here, as 
well as back there. I saw some men there 
like these, only with big long ears, and 
other men called them donkeys. We pass 
on, and by and by we reach a cool and 
lovely spot wHere the green deck changes 
to brown, and a lot of masts have been 
built into it. I am told we are in a forest. 
What an odd set of masts ! All full of 
such yards and cross-trees! And the poles 
jut up so close to each other, everything 
above is a tangle. They are all yard-arm 
and yard-arm ! Bless my eyes if I can 
make out a single shroud to them all ! 
No sails, no halliards, no clew-lines nor 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 75 

garnets, no shrouds nor ratlines, no stays, 
no braces, no rigging of any kind, what 
do they want of all those curious yards, 
every one of which is jogged up and twisted 
and gone askew to nothing ? Ha ! ha ! 
what land-lubber stuck all those masts into 
the deck, and forgot to put in even one 
jib ? This is a wonderful world. Now I 
hear some music. Up there where the top- 
gallant shrouds ought to be, and away up 
on that royal mast, I see gulls have boarded 
us. My weather eye is out for them, and I 
can see the stormy petrels and sea-gulls 
alight. But Mother Carey's chickens here 
are curious things. And I never saw such 
infant sea-gulls before, nor so many sorts 
and colors as well as sizes. Nor did I ever 
hear them express their thoughts so deli- 
cately. Oh, they are sweet, perfectly sweet, 
and I am charmed to death almost. What 
a remarkable kind of a place this is ! We 



76 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

climb over a gunwale, but there is no danger 
of falling into the briny. On we walk until 
we come to a cabin, as they call it, though 
we have no such cabin on our ship. While 
my folks are stopping here I go out of the 
cubin on to the deck again. Looking far 
away, I box the compass. Then I climb 
over a stone bulwark into what they call a 
road, though a ship's yawl would get aground 
in such shallow roads as they have here. I 
sit down in the sand until I begin to feel 
dizzy ; then I sway myself up and swing 
along on my pins, tramping to windward, 
then to leeward, and boxing the compass 
again while I take a turn around. I dive 
into this land-lubber's cabin once more, 
and, finding my folks not ready yet to go, 
it occurs to me that I will ride on the 
hurricane deck a while. I hoist myself up 
a stairway, then up a ladder, but the hur- 
ricane deck is all tipped to larboard, and 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 77 

hangs there ; it is too steep to stand on ; 
I should slide into the lee-scuppers unless 
I belayed myself to that red, square 
smoke-pipe; so I climb back and fumble 
around in the galley. Soon I am about 
to go down into the hold, when the old 
salts here tell me it is so dark down 
there I couldn't see my hand a rod be- 
fore me ; so I only fathom it with a 
stone tied to a string, until I hollo at 
the strange sight of two green eyes down 
there in the dark looking up at me aw- 
fully. Out on deck I go again, and pick- 
ing out the smallest mast hereaway, I shin 
up to the main-yard, but there I get stuck 
and have to be lifted out yelling. I am 
hurt, but I soon get over that, and I am 
so satisfied I laugh in perfect glee at the 
host of new and mysterious things I see 
around me everywhere. Day after day I 
enjoy sights, sights, sights, delights, delights, 



78 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

delights! I want to live here always, but in 
a few days my father says that old Neptune 
is loudly calling for us, and we must go. 
So I take a dismal leave of this, my beauti- 
ful Heaven, with its myriad contents, never 
to see them, perhaps, any more. Oh ! it is 
hard, hard to part with all the lovely beings 
here, knowing that they remain to enjoy 
their varied lives amid these entrancing 
scenes, while I must go upon the ocean's 
drear waste, and see no land again for a long, 
long time. To leave the endless variety of 
music here, and endure the monotonous roar 
of the sea alone, is a misery ; but there is no 
help for it, so I sadly bestir myself for our 
departure. With tears in my eyes I kiss all 
the little angels I can find, and I throw one 
big, wholesale kiss to the delicate little petrels 
and every other sweet creature that dwells in 
this paradise bidding them all come and see 
me if they can, early and often, in my home 



MR. GfflM'S DREAM. 79 

upon the sea. Away we sail, and this little 
four-year-old fellow grows homesick, or land- 
sick, or something, as well as seasick. A 
furious gale comes and tosses us up and 
around so carelessly that my little stomach 
cannot endure it without issuing a protest 
After the brief sojourn where it was so calm 
and where I was so happy, treading a deck 
that heaved so rarely, I must now become 
accustomed to the motion of the seething sea 
again. Oh ! I do not want this any more ! 
I long for the solid Heaven I left behind me ! 
But on we totter, the gale above us passes, 
the raging fever of the ocean subsides, and 
through the ordinary swell of the crestfallen 
sea we cut our way, carrying every sheet in 
the wind, all of us growing more contented 
every day in the cheering sunlight's blaze. 
We have a stock of harpoons on board. 
Every man is enlisted for a warfare of two 
years and twenty months against the whales, 



8o MR. GfflM'S DREAM. 

and we are bound for that cold sea where 
many of the oily giants swim. We occa- 
sionally meet other ships. They are all 
plunging along as we are, rolling and pitch- 
ing. But we pass a huge dark object that 
neither rolls nor pitches in the least. Waves 
are breaking their heads upon it, yet the 
grim pile stands unmoved. This little four- 
year-old boy is interested to inquire why that 
thing is not tossed about like other things 
on the water, and I am told that it is a 
rock. The answer does not satisfy me, for 
it seems to me that if it is a rock it ought 
to rock. Our vessel seems more of a real 
"rock" to me, and that dark object is the 
only staunch thing I have seen upon the 
water. They tell me it does not float, while 
the vessel does ; and they explain the differ- 
ence, to my satisfaction ; but by and by we 
pass another great object that is really float- 
ing, yet neither rocking nor a rock ; a 



MR. GfflM'S DREAM. 81 

massive thing, not dark and frowning, but 
bright and glistening ; supported by the 
water, though it is hard and solid all 
through ; a vast object that is moving 
steadily and grandly, heedless of the mightiest 
waves, and able to carry a multitude of peo- 
ple if they could get upon it. I am in- 
formed it is an iceberg, and I inquire why 
we do not travel upon an iceberg, or upon 
something steady like that, instead of being 
tossed about in such a frail thing as a ship. I 
do not get a satisfactory answer to my queries. 
They tell me that an iceberg melts and dis- 
appears, but I tell them that wood does not 
melt, and I want to know why we do not 
have a ship or something of that size, or 
of some sort of respectable size, so that the 
strongest gales cannot imperil or disturb us. 
The sailors all laugh. No question ever 
seemed to them more idle. But no question 
ever seemed to me more important. I persist 



82 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

in my inquiries till I sober them, when they 
seriously answer that they are dumbfounded. 
And well they might be. 

The waves of the ocean were tremendous 
when I first looked upon them. My little 
eyes beheld them in all their real glory, 
and I see them still the same. The cir- 
cumstances were such that I felt the winds 
and saw the waves just as they were, and not 
as they might be imagined afar off. I was 
too young to be intoxicated with glamour, 
and to call the terrible waters sublime. I 
could only view them in the light of their 
own actual worth. No preconceived opinions 
of mine were operating then to mould them 
to an ideal. Romance was not there, to 
brighten their fearful mien, to charm away 
the reality. Precisely as the waves were, 
they rolled before me ; and the impression 
they fixed upon a new mind was true and 
lasting. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 83 

To one who was born and brought up on 
the sea, there is a rich ludicrousness in the 
ideas of those who were not (so far as their 
ideas pertain to that subject the sea). 
After settling upon land, nothing so amused 
me as to hear the narrow ideas of people 
in general upon so great a matter as the 
ocean. I found the impression common 
among them that a vessel four or five hun- 
dred feet long is a huge thing ! Bless their 
little hearts, it may seem great to them. It 
is great when compared with smaller things, 
but a mere trifle when compared with greater 
things. Everything is judged by compari- 
son. Quietly resting in still water at the 
dock, with river steamboats around, and a 
rowboat happening near, the ocean steamer 
appears a vast object. Place it in a dry-dock, 
and it seems larger still. But it is not in its 
element. Replace it in its element, and view 
it when that element in mid-ocean is surging 



84 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

around it fiercely, threatening its life the 
comparison is there reversed ; the mightier 
mass belittles the vessel to a mere nothing ; 
it disappears altogether, and the drowning 
wretches find it worse than nothing, for it 
brought them to their destruction. In their 
last moments they perceive that the ocean 
steamer, four or five hundred feet long, is not 
a very great thing after all ; that if it had 
been four or five hundred feet shorter it 
would have been quite as great in the end ; 
that such a thing as that is not a fit article 
with which to navigate a stormy sea ; that 
they would not be in a more unnatural situ- 
ation if that same vessel, with themselves on 
board, were in one of the streets of New- 
York Canal street, for instance endeavoring 
to sail on the dampness which settles there 
when the sweet springtime comes. 

It is easy to see how the erroneous im- 
pression originated, that a vessel four or five 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 85 

hundred feet long is a massive object Almost 
every one obtains the first impression of an 
ocean steamer by seeing it lying quietly at 
the dock, or moving steadily through the still 
waters of a harbor, where the contrast with 
boats or with ripples can only serve to mag- 
nify the ocean steamer in appearance the 
ocean itself being so far in the background 
as to be on the other side of the picture, 
out of sight. With most persons, the first 
impression of an ocean steamer has nothing 
of the ocean about it, and is consequently a 
false impression. And first impressions are 
not eradicated easily. If every one caught 
the first sight of an ocean steamer while it 
was performing its function, laboring to sur- 
vive a terrific storm at sea, we should all 
regard an ocean steamer as no very great 
affair on the ocean. 

In consequence of the ideas of people who 
emanate from the land, pursuing their ludi- 



86 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

crous little methods in regard to the ocean, 
the briny deep is salting them down at a 
fearful rate. If it were not horrible, it would 
be laughable, to see intelligent people con- 
tinue a system of navigation by which thou- 
sands of the most highly organized beings 
upon earth perish every year unnecessarily. 

The champion grave-digger of the world 
is Neptune. If you wish to be buried 
nicely, speedily, thoroughly, cheaply, yet fash- 
ionably, go to him. He is an undertaker as 
well as a grave-digger, and will take your 
whole case into his own hands. It will be 
attended to at once, though he has a great 
deal to do. He is always busy somewhere. 
His business is overwhelming. And no one 
could carry on that business better. He has 
been extensively patronized by all classes, 
taking the highest to the lowest. He will 
bury you more than six feet deep if you 
wish ; he will put you as low as you please. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 87 

You have but to let him reach and take 
you, when he will gently lay you in a grave 
so deep that no body-snatcher on earth will 
ever get a rope around your neck for an 
enterprising doctor to plunge his knife into 
your still mysterious spleen. 

Although Neptune is very strong, he has 
one weak point : he lacks intelligence. He 
pervades eveiy drop of every ocean with his 
might, yet the whole is merely blind force 
The enlightened force of intelligence in all 
men combined, however, does not successfully 
cope with that blind force ; there is not a 
safe conveyance on the ocean ! 

If " knowledge is power," Neptune's power 
over man has been very great for one pos- 
sessing Neptune's amount of knowledge. 

Neptune has no more knowledge of what 
he is doing than if he were a crazy man 
or an angry woman, or a mad dog, or a red- 
hot stove. And has Neptune's powerful en- 



88 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

emy, Man, been more thoughtful ? Failing 
to provide against the simple combination 
of weak drops of water in motion, thousands 
of souls every year are completely washed 
out of the bodies that were made especially 
for them. 

Human beings rush upon the sea, there 
to be lightly tossed off into ready-made 
graves which rise to fold them in. 

Whole shiploads of people from time to 
time have disappeared. Four of the best 
steamships, the President, the Pacific, the 
City of Glasgow, and the City of Boston, 
were never heard from after leaving port for 
the last time. Hundreds of persons upon 
each of those vessels were forever missing. 

Another steamer Pacific has been lost, and 
more than 100 persons have gone down with 
it. 

The great ocean disasters of recent years 
are vividly remembered: the steamer Ville 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. . 89 

du Havre carried down to death 226 per- 
sons, the Schiller 311, the Atlantic nearly 
500, the Cospatrick nearly 500. 

Among the legion of shipwrecks I will 
enumerate a few others, in alphabetical order, 

without including in the list a single case 

where less than a hundred persons per- 
ished : 

The Amazon, .... Jan. 4, 1852, ; lives lost, 102 

" Anna Jane, . . . Sept. 29, 1853 ; " " 393 

" Arctic, Sept. 27, 1854; 323 

" Austria, Sept. 13, 1858 \ " " 461 

" Birkenhead, . . . Feb. 26, 1852; " " 438 

" Cambria, .... Oct. 19, 1870; " " 170 

" Captain, Sept. 7, 1870; " " 500 

" Central America, . 1857; " " 417 

" Charles Bartlett, . . July, 1849 ; " " 132 

" Earl of Abergavenny, Feb. 5, 1805 ; " " 247 

" Exmouth, . . . . April 28, 1847; " " 2 5 Z 

" Favorite, ..... April 28, 1854 ; " " 201 

" Floridian, .... Feb. 28, 1849 ; " 174 

" Golden Gate, . . . July 27, 1862 ; " " 204 

" Halsewell, . . . . Jan. 6, 1786; " " 166 

" John, May 3, 1855; " " 190 

" Lady Nugent, . . . May, 1854; " " 400 



9 o ^ MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

The London, Jan. n, 1866; lives lost, 230 

" Northfleet, .... Jan. 22, 1873 J " " 2 93 

" Ocean Monarch, . . Aug. 24, 1848 ; " " 178 

" Pomona, April 28, 1859 ; " " 386 

" Powhattan, .... April 15, 1854; " " 250 

" Queen Charlotte, . . Sept. 19,1854; " " 117 

" Queen Charlotte, . . March 17, 1800; " " 700 

" Rothsay Castle, . . Aug. 17, 1831 ; " " 130 

" Royal Adelaide, . t . April 30, 1850; " " 206 

" .Royal Charter, . .0^.26,1859; " 459 

" Royal George,. . . Aug. 29, 1782; " " 800 

" San Francisco, . . . Dec. 24, 1853; " " 300 

" Staffordshire, . . . Dec. 29, 1853 ; " " 175 

" Tayleur, Jan. 21, 1854; " " 290 

These were among the so-called large 
vessels. Reckoning the vast number of 
lives lost by the destruction of smaller ves- 
sels, the total for any one year is several 
thousand persons. 

From the little port of Gloucester, Mass., 
over 300 vessels have gone to wreck within 
one generation. 

During six tempestuous weeks beginning 
in December, 1839, 1 9 2 vessels were driven 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 91 

upon the shore of New England ; 192 com- 
plete wrecks; 89 of them on one day, Dec. 
15. 1839. 

The loss of vessels from all the ports of 
the world together is enormous every year. 

For instance, during only one month (May, 
1873) 1 6 of the vessels bound to or from 
American ports alone were lost. 

In the previous summer, 41 vessels en- 
gaged in the seal fishery were wrecked on 
the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland. 
Those 41 vessels contained 4,000 persons, of 
whom only 175 were saved. Thus, in one 
year 3,825 persons 'were drowned in one 
small portion of one of the oceans. Though 
such fatality at sea is not the rule, the 
average is great, and the aggregate is im- 
mense. 

Yet the same old system continues." Little 
things called ships are built, in great num- 
bers, and sent out to destruction. 



92 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

In 1873 the number of vessels built in 
America was 1,700. 

In the five years ending with 1872, the 
number of vessels built in America was 
5,387, and the number of American vessels 
lost during those five years was 2,117, nearly 
half as many as were built. 

There are now more than 20,000 vessels 
in ocean waters, yet not a one is A i. 

Now let us turn from the unprofitable 
past to the glorious future. 

There is one perfectly safe and sure way 
to cross the ocean. And only one. Have 
patience, and we will come to it and give it 
a thorough examination together. When 
upon the sea, the amount of one's patience 
and long-suffering is greater than it should be. 

The ships we embark in go to pieces, and 
the difficulty is supposed to be without 
remedy. If our dwelling-houses were as fre- 
quently to break in pieces and scatter us 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. 93 

out, or if they were in the habit of surging 
around and shaking us up without spilling 
us out, something would be done ! In this 
part of the world something on a large 
scale would be very soon begun, in the en- 
deavor to reform the matter. Houses would 
be built which could not so readily wabble. 
Vessels can be built which will not disport 
themselves in a risky and ludicrous style. 
There is a way to build a ship that cannot 
sink or go to pieces, cannot pitch or roll. 

And the same method will avert seasick- 
ness, that broad, deep, long, high, insurmount- 
able misery, that wretchedness, beginning with 
the grim shadow of dreaded seasickness, and 
merging into the agony of terribly real 
seasickness ! It is time for a demurrer to 
the action. Year after year, century after 
century, man has travelled the ocean ; and 
what has been done to alleviate, or even 
mitigate, the sufferings of the journey, the 



94 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

pangs from that abominable disorder, that 
old complaint, that worthless relic of an age 
weak with ignorance, that shameful barbarism 
of deportment at sea called seasickness ? 

The most widespread epidemic that ever 
travelled the world was seasickness. And 
what is its present condition ? The malady 
still prevails. It covers the ocean, for even 
the great portion of the nineteenth century 
gone has failed to combine the simple ele- 
ments of a compound which is to quell the 
epidemic. Smaller ills are met, each with its 
antidote; the more occult the nature of an 
ill, the more its counteracting agent is sought 
while plainer difficulties are overlooked. The 
evil of too great power has one plain anti- 
dote : equal power. Let the force of the 
ocean be what it may at any one point, man 
can bring a greater force of resistance at 
that point if he will. And he certainly will ! 
Then may the ship say unto the ocean, as 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 95 

Emilia so quaintly said to Othello, "Thou 
hast not half the power to do me harm 
that I have to be hurt!" 

Building a vessel that can be easily over- 
come and sunk by the force of a soulless 
body is absurd ! Tossing upon the water 
when we do not like the motion is ridic- 
ulous ! Tossing out victuals is ludicrous ! 
The coming man will do no such thing on 
the coming ship, for the coming ship will 
be adapted to the man aboard. He will 
not walk in a zigzag line on a ship that 
bobs along in a zigzag course. He will 
not appear highly intoxicated in the calm 
endeavor to tread an inclined plane which 
is shifting every moment He will not 
yearn for the end of his journey. Nor 
will he be forced to bring his journey to a 
sudden end among the purple mullets. 

No! If man's ingenuity cannot contrive 
a method of going safely and smoothly over 



96 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

a mere inanimate substance no harder than 
the soft and fluent matter called water then 
the age of improvements has ended! 

Many thousand persons are rocking upon 
the ocean at all times. Rocking and reeling 
and tottering over the sea oh, it is ridicu- 
lous ! Every hour, every minute, several thou- 
sand persons are deep in the agony of 
seasickness. Their feelings can never be 
known by those who are only slightly af- 
fected. Seasickness as experienced by some 
is merely nausea for a day or two. Let them 
not sneer at the malady in others, who pass 
through the most excruciating series of tor- 
ments that human nature can bear. Words 
cannot be found strong enough to describe 
it. However sensational it seems, it is all 
true seasickness is. There is no romance 
about it. Yet it is stirringly sensational. In 
its hardest, strongest, fiercest form, it runs 
into ship-fever, and is fatal. 



MR. GffSM'S DREAM. 97 

There are pleasant ways in which to regard 
seasickness. One is to consider it an auc- 
tion, whereby we are clearing out a stock of 
damaged goods, and they are going cheap. 
Everything must be disposed of. Here is a 
pie, an elegant pie, just now taken in; how 
much is it worth? You can't buy these 
goods new for less than ten or fifteen cents. 
To be sure, this is second-hand; but how 
much is it worth? One scent. Only one 
scent. Going, going, gone to Mr. Neptune 
there, for only one scent. Now, here is a 
piece of tripe we laid in earlier ; some onions 
and cheese and many other things along with 
it ; how much for the lot ? The onions alone 
would be sure to bring a scent. But they 
must all go together. What is the lot worth ? 
Start them at anything you like ; they will 
be sure to go. How much for the lot ? The 
tripe may be a little the worse for wear, but 
it can't be much worse. One scent will start 



98 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

them. There they go, to Mr. Neptune, for one 
scent. Next is a good, solid, rich, yellow, 
saleratus biscuit, every chink full of powerful 
soda. It will certainly bring a dolor. A 
dolor to start it. A dolor. Going only a 
dolor going, going, gone to Mr. Neptune 
again, and for only one dolor. Cheap enough 
for that. Here is a little soup left ; we had 
more, but we couldn't get along at all with- 
out using some of it, and this is what is 
left of the quickly nourishing soup. Excel- 
lent soup once. Take it now for what it's 
worth. Nothing to start it. Who bids more ? 
Nothing, nothing, nothing. Gone to Mr. 
Neptune for nothing. 

There are unpleasant ways, also, in which 
to regard seasickness. When seasick, all is 
horribleness ! There is no way to rest ! The 
world has broken loose ! We are maddening ! 
We look in every direction, but there is 
nothing to depend upon; not an atom is 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 99 

quiet; everything we see and feel is in terri- 
ble motion ! The air is rushing, the ocean is 
boiling, the billows are foaming, the water 
is dashing, the waves are leaping, the spray 
is drenching, the surges are thundering, the 
ship is rolling and pitching, its prow is div- 
ing, its masts are bending, its joints are 
creaking, its timbers are groaning, upon its 
heaving deck we are roaming it is a world 
of solids and fluids in a fever of action ! Yet 
the world around us seems calm compared 
to the chaos of gyrating solids and fluids 
within us! 

Let us consider the pleasures to be derived 
in travelling upon a first-class steamship. Here 
we roll in the luxury of stately staterooms. 
Delectable ! This is princely suffering ! We 
surge out and roll more heavily. It is the 
very poetry of motion in blank verse ! En- 
tering a series of elegant saloons, and noting 
the superb misery to be had in the first- 



ioo MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

cabin are we pained ? Let us not be squeam- 
ish about it ; the pain we feel is the very ex- 
cess of delight! We are simply infatuated 
with vexation. What fine carving ! What 
exquisite torment ! What rich upholstering ! 
What interesting spasms ! What lovely tints ! 
What grand convulsions ! What supernal 
chandeliers ! What gay fits ! What charm- 
ing gilt! What sublime explosions! What 
beautiful wainscotings ! What extreme feel- 
ings! What downy seats! What sumptuous 
wretchedness ! The doors extend to us bright 
silver hands ; the richly painted walls bloom 
with golden touches ; the glassy varnish re- 
flects our happiness all, all, and adds so 
much to our joy ! We are swayed from de- 
light to delight What handsome doorways ! 
What showy stairways ! How pretty all 
ways ! A fickle ship in display ! She is 
richly attired for a dance, and is she not 
gaily rushing through a lively season! We 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 101 

think of her gilded trappings, and how they 
soothe our troubled feelings. Oh, we are en- 
during splendid misery! Let the ocean roar; 
no matter what is without when all this is 
within ! Sublimity everywhere ! The ship 
has a npble prow! Don't we enjoy it! We 
are compelled to stagger among mahogany. 
If it were oak, perhaps we should be un- 
happy. If pine, we might be miserable. We 
are pitched by fate to unexpected pleasures* 
A sick stranger is flung to us for a desperate 
embrace. Another lurch, and away we go, 
sadly parting. Life is dreadfully enchanting 
here. We are frantic in admiration of the 
ocean, yet we have only seen the surface; 
we shall be lost in speechless pleasures if we 
go down. While the ship floats we appreci- 
ate every trifle of happiness vouchsafed to 
us. Ever surrounded by jauntily moving or- 
naments, we thread our devious way among 
these pretty things, feeling ineffable feelings, 



102 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

looking at every portion of the ship in turn, 
utterly satisfied with it all. Existence here 
has a charm of its own. It is sweet trouble! 
It is imperial agony ! It is a blissful fore- 
taste of eternal punishment ! But we need 
not feel any anxiety; everything here is first- 
class; we may feel perfect security; we could 
not ourselves more safely decorate the cabin, 
nor more securely deck the deck. Depend 
upon it, the whole vessel is safely adorned. 
The prow will never make a fatal plunge, 
for if you could see the figure-head ! if you 
could but look into the face of that divine 
protecting genius ! We are free from danger 
all around the hull is guarded from the 
ocean by thick coats of paint. Moreover, 
the outline is a graceful contour. Everything 
has been done that could be done. Money 
was lavished upon the engines down there, 
to give the iron a rich lustre. Every bit of 
the ship is sufficiently refined and polished. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 103 

The vessel is perfect; not a crack could be 
discovered. Passengers are all right, in any 
event they occupy the finest part of the 
ship. Could so ornate a vessel sink ? Is it 
possible that such a beautiful feminine crea- 
ture could dive all over into that dirty 
water, and get drowned ? Well, if she did, 
every glittering thing will cheer us with its 
bright looks when the ship sinks. We will 
feast our eyes upon the sparkling tips of 
burnished brass. Drowning, we shall be happy 
to know that " a thing of beauty is a joy 
forever," and therefore such beautiful things 
as these ocean steamers must go on delight- 
ing other people thus forever. Posterity, we 
congratulate you. An ocean steamer, inside 
or outside, is a dreadfully charming place. 
How delightful to heave with overwhelming 
emotion amid such scenes ! How sweet to 
visit the railing, and linger there ! These are 
blissful throes of anguish ! Upon a first-class 



104 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

steamship nausea is simply divine ! After ex- 
ploring the whole vessel a few hundred times^ 
we meet objects that look a little familiar. 
We recognize them, and sometimes we are 
moved to embrace them. It seems as though 
we had always lived here and sometimes as 
though we should die here. It is a pictur- 
esque locality for walking. With carefully 
studied gait, we loiter along from saloon to sa- 
loon. Ah ! these fleeting moments are linger- 
ing hours of halcyon distress. When sated with 
the glory of all the ship's saloons, we can 
seek the hidden charm of freshness in that 
retired nook, that pretty niche, that lovely 
retreat the state-room. Entering that bower, 
the pleasing memories awakened are inde- 
scribable. When we leave this fragrant niche, 
we trip around over the deck, and fantas- 
tically toe the bulwark. There we obtain 
immediate relief from too much of a good 
thing. We leave the bulwark with a lighter 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 105 

step, and plunge under cover, taking um- 
brage at a sofa, beneath a proudly swaying 
wall. Then something suddenly happens 
again. " History repeats itself." Oh ! we are 
having a grand time ! These are the stirring 
moments that make our lives worth living! 
How sweet the air! Nothing could ap- 
proach the fragrance ! A ship's aroma there 
is no other property like it ! We smell it, 
we condemn it, we keep it, we hate it, we 
breathe it, we loathe it, we avoid it, we catch 
it, we shun it, we despise it, we chew it, we 
cannot help it, we swallow it, we have it, 
we drink it, we secure it, we dwell upon it, 
we move in it, we fill our pockets with it, 
and every stitch of clothing receives and 
holds its share of it. Every charming nook 
in the ship is redolent of it. We feel, with 
Othello, " if it were now to die, 'twere now 
to be most happy "though he said it soon 
after getting married, and in troth we are in 



io6 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

a different plight. In many ways the vessel 
enthralls us. The activity of perennial youth 
pervades it. Exhilaration reigns. Look at 
the lively hangings. The walls come and 
go. The people move with alacrity. We 
are thrown together frequently ; we often 
meet unexpectedly ; this is a pleasure : this 
is companionship ! Sometimes a number of 
us get together in a knot in one corner; 
without knowing why, we gather suddenly, 
and hold a mysterious conclave; then we all 
go to another corner; soon we go back 
again, all together ; then we are all moved 
to try that other corner again ; we go 
through these proceedings several times ; 
this is society ! Eating is one of the pleas- 
ant horrors, too. Hesitation and celerity join 
their forces above the board. When we take 
dinner or supper, or break that sweet fast 
in the morning, the table is well supplied 
with the various kinds of motion. English 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. 107 

plates glide, and upon them our French rolls 
roll. These China cups of China tea are 
very fluent ; coffee is quite as rapid in its 
delivery, getting the floor and holding it, 
agitating the whole assembly. Butter spreads 
itself likewise, and bread of course goes after 
it. The meat is restless, and the cheese 
more animated than usual. The ham en- 
deavors to walk again. How the eggs are 
rolling. The tongue is extremely active, 
though it says nothing. Expectation is on 
tiptoe, ready to rush out to the bulwark. 
Hurry, hurry, is the rule. Kiss me quick 
and go, my victuals. Quick returns and 
small profits by eating. The various forces 
of the edibles are correlated at last in the 
stomach, and converted into one kind of 
motion. Returning from the bulwark, ex- 
amine the gilt-edged mirrors, and admire the 
picture of happiness in each. Walk out on 
deck again for more delights. You can take 



io8 MR. GHIJWS DREAM. 

a bath for nothing in the lee-scuppers ; and 
when you find you may slide down hill all 
day without walking up, it is enough to 
convert old age into youth or second child- 
hood. At night, if you would study astron- 
omy, every mast will bow to you, and point 
out every star. 

Seasickness is one of the greatest evils of 
the world, and I am about to propose a plan, 
involving a radical change in nautical affairs, 
which will obviate the misery and peril of 
sea voyages. 

When this new system of navigation has 
been adopted, we shall have no poets exas- 
perating our minds with such an awful pre- 
sentation of truth as the following : 

" Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell ; 

Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave; 
Then some leaped overboard with dreadful yell, 
As eager to anticipate their grave." 

Nor shall we continue to be pained by 
such a dreadful ending as this: 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 109 

" Till, all exhausted and bereft of strength, 
O'erpowered they yield to cruel fate at length. 
The burying waters close around their head 
They sink ! forever numbered with the dead." 

And, alas ! we shall not dwell with mourn- 
ful pleasure on the sweet rhythm which tells 
us thus the sad sequel of lives cut off in the 
brightness of youth and strength and hope : 

"Soft sigh the winds of heaven o'er their grave, 
While the billow mournful rolls, 
And the mermaid's song condoles, 
Singing glory to the souls 
Of the brave." 

The following tribute, too, will be brought 
to light as a curiosity in literature, a relic of 
the age of shipwrecks: 

" God rest the brave 
Who 'neath the Atlantic wave 

Have sunk to their last home ! 

****** 
The tempest blast their parting knell, 
The gurgling waters their farewell, 
. Their winding sheet the cold dark wave, 
Their gallant ship her liegemen's grave." 



no MR. GHfM'S DREAM. 

And scarcely credible will seem the fact 
that mankind ever sacrificed itself to the 
ocean so freely as to inspire the beautiful la- 
ment in the following sad apostrophe to Nep- 
tune: 

" To thee the love of woman hath gone down ; 

Dark flow thy tides o'er manhood's noble head, 
O'er youth's bright locks and beauty's flowery crown. 

Yet must thou hear a voice : ' Restore the dead ! 
Earth shall reclaim her precious things from thee ; 
Restore the dead, thou sea !' " 

Equally strange then will this more sub- 
lime apostrophe to Neptune seem : 

" Upon the watery plain 
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain 

A shadow of man's ravage, save his own, 
When for a moment, like a drop of rain, 

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, 
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown." 

With stranger feelings still the future anti- 
quarian will sound the following lines, and 
marvel at the simple foolhardiness of these 
times : 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. in 

"Hark! Pity! Hark! 

Now mounts, now totters on the tempest's wings, 
Now grounds and shivers the replunging bark. 
Cling to the shrouds ! In vain !" 

But he will be utterly astounded on learn- 
ing by his researches that people in this age 
of abundant energy cared more for ostenta- 
tious display than they did for their lives, 
and travelled in ships that would burn. As 
no pity is called for under such circumstances, 
we cannot well blame the future antiquarian 
if his sense of the ludicrous moves him to 
hilarious laughter when he comes across such 
piteous lines as these : 

"Lo! o'er the waves a lurid light is cast; 

Blood-red the ship pursues her burning way; 
Devoured by fire, sore smitten by the blast, 
Her doom is sealed ere dawns another day." 

When he stops laughing at such incongru- 
ity his comment will be : " Well, they were 
simply foolish to navigate with such com bus- 



iia MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

tible little things. Yet they had thousands 
and thousands of those before they had one 
of the right kind. In 1877 tne 7 na cl over 
twenty thousand sea-going vessels, and not 
one of them worthy to be used for sea-going. 
Not a person on earth until then had ever 
put forth the idea of building a vessel of the 
right size and shape. The people of that 
period spent their abundance on mere show, 
and idled away their time in writing poetical 
wails over their griefs, instead of taking hold 
and working practically to improve, to ad- 
vance, to do away with their imperfect struc- 
tures, to rise above their difficulties, to remove 
the cause of their continually recurring ocean 
catastrophes." 

Pursuing his researches, he will ponder over 
the ponderous strangeness of such extraordi- 
nary doings as these : 

" A thousand miles from land are we, 
Tossing about on the roaring seal 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 113 

From billow to bounding billow cast, 
Like fleecy snow on the stormy blast !" 

In his grim delight at the seeming novelty 
of any human being being so ridiculously 
circumstanced, and yet perceiving that it is 
not a novelty, but a thing of the past, he 
may exclaim : " There is nothing new under 
the sun!" 

But there is. And the change I am about 
to propose in the method of navigating the 
sea will develop an entirely new thing under 
the sun. 

Our water vehicles have been touched up 
with a few changes now and then. How 
steamers can be pushed forward with the 
least amount of puffing and sweating has 
been importantly discussed, and a great deal 
of thought has been given to the angles and 
curves. Ho ! let the angles and curves be 
what they may, and the boilers large or 
small, the ocean rolls around them all with 



ii4 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

a power so terrible that every ship is made 
to squeak, and some of our greatest favorites 
are lost. The ocean beats upon the shore 
of every land, proudly exclaiming to Inven- 
tion, " Thus far shalt thou come, but no 
farther!" and inventors have stood awe- 
stricken, regarding the great highway of 
nations as one that must always be uncom- 
fortable, and always dangerous to travel. 

The great subject of ocean transit has 
been darkly and narrowly viewed. We still 
trust our giddy creations where they will sink 
or swim, according to the weather; and we 
trust ourselves upon them, expecting to 
survive or perish, doubtful which. 

Our greatest vehicles on land all move 
with majesty and power; our greatest vehi- 
cles on water are kicked about in a style 
truly laughable. 

The future will reflect and wonder at the 
relative proportions of our land and water 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 115 

structures, when the former are built to 
quietly sleep and the latter must live in fury. 
On land we have acres covered by one roof ; 
blocks joined to blocks; a city, miles in ex- 
tent, with conjoint houses, ubiquitous pave- 
ment, with intersecting gas-pipes, sewers, and 
water-pipes; forming one grand structure, 
complete in itself, interdependent, a unity; 
and yet, with all its greatness, to rest upon 
the quiet earth. Such a thing is possible ; 
it is achieved. A unity of much less dimen- 
sions, only sufficient to traverse the ocean 
securely, is certainly possible, and it will be 
achieved. 

Manifestly there is a need of something 
better to take the place of the unreliable 
thing called a ship. 

Now let us see precisely what is required. 
Safety, of course. Speed is but a secondary 
consideration. Safety first. How shall we 
secure safety ? By obtaining steadiness. We 



n6 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

may like swiftness, but we must have steadi- 
ness. A ship that is steady is safe; a man 
that is steady is safe. Many a ship is fast, 
but not steady or safe; many a man is fast, 
but not steady or safe. Vessels at the dock 
are steady, but when they go to sea they 
become intoxicated. Some men do when 
they go away on a journey. A ship, so 
quiet and well behaved where civilized people 
dwell, is terribly unsteady when travelling 
abroad. The reason is plain : ships have not 
yet grown large enough to resist the power- 
ful influences thrown around them. And 
when ships develop to the right size they 
will progress to the right form. It will 
never make the passage of the Atlantic safe 
and comfortable to augment the number of 
its little floating palaces. They are swarming 
out of the Clyde and the Delaware, but the 
savage sea is ready for them ; their numbers 
cannot avail ; the ocean has power to destroy 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 117 

them all, one by one. Swell the number of 
the uncanny things till every square mile of 
ocean has its bobbing toy ! yet the very 
finest will be kicked and cuffed around un- 
feelingly, broken unmercifully, ruined utterly ! 

The ocean is a broad-gauge route ! Broad- 
gauge vehicles are required for such a strik- 
ingly broad-gauge route. The route is tried 
by a host of vehicles ; not one of them fits 
the track. They are all of one sort by being 
narrow-gauge ; and the narrow-gauge is clearly 
inadequate. Centuries of experience unite 
their long lists of ocean horrors to show 
that a narrow-gauge vehicle is not adapted 
to a broad-gauge route; yet a narrow-minded 
policy continues trying hard to run narrow- 
gauge vehicles comfortably on a broad-gauge 
route. 

The great ocean vehicle of the future will 
not be called a ship. Vivid recollections of 
seasickness will die with that word. The 



n8 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

distantly coming man will laugh upon ascer- 
taining in musty books what ships were. 
The vehicle made to carry him over the 
stormy sea will less resemble a ship of the 
present day than a whale resembles a min- 
now. 

Let us conceive the thing whereon the 
future man will traverse every ocean. And, 
for the convenience of a name, let us call 
the mighty structure a TOTO. 



Taking one long leap requiring hundreds 
of years, we come down in New Jersey. 
Thus reaching the center of New Jersey, we 
proceed northeasterly, in the direction of 
what was formerly Jersey City. Before we 
arrive within a dozen miles we enter the 
suburbs of a vast commercial city. We 
find that Manhattan Island overflowed in 
every direction long ago, and now New York 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 119 

and New Jersey here are one. New York 
City and all its populous neighborhood, in- 
cluding a piece of the State of New Jersey 
ceded to it, were united into one grand 
municipality, in order that America might 
wear the honor of having the largest city in 
the world. And here it is : a city of stu- 
pendous proportions, and rapidly growing ; 
containing already tens of millions of deni- 
zens ; the commercial emporium of a conti- 
nent whereon dwell five hundred millions of 
people. 

New York City swung its arms around 
New York Bay, and took it all into its 
embrace. 

Floating in the waters of this bay are 
worthy bearers for the mighty commerce of 
this port. From the Narrows around to the 
Narrows again, the densely populated shore 
is lined with structures that were built for 
use, for safety and for comfort on the water. 



120 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Interspersed with river craft are those of quite 
another form and size, and built as differently 
from river craft as an ocean is differenj: from 
a river. 

Touching at intervals the shore around 
the bay, and touching Manhattan Island at 
various points, these sea-going and seaworthy 
conveyances are receiving and discharging 
mankind and merchandise. All these ocean 
vehicles have to encounter the same bois- 
terous Atlantic Ocean, and they are all of a 
similar shape and size. They are just large 
enough for safety where the elements are 
fiercest. A greater magnitude than that is 
not required, and who could now be satisfied 
with anything less? 

In the ignorance and weakness of the 
world's youth, of course, mankind was forced 
to endure hardships. But as the world gath- 
ered strength it gathered the means of ob- 
taining the comforts of life. And thus many 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 121 

hardships were swept away by inventors. In 
the latter part of the nineteenth century one 
arose and inquired : Wherefore the necessity 
of enduring the last and greatest of all hard- 
ships when easy ships might be built to take 
the place of the hard ships? 

Mankind soon built an easy ship, and called 
the easy ship a Toto. 

We will go on board a Toto, and see what 
it is. 

In passing from the solid ground to the 
Toto, we pass from a city on land to a neat 
little city on water. The buildings are not 
so high, and there are other differences to be 
described. 

We enter the floating little city by its cen- 
tral thoroughfare, and walk straight on to the 
other end. The distance is only 600 yards. 
But in traversing these cross streets we are 
particularly struck with the breadth of the 
Toto, for it is half its length. Its horizontal 



129 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

boundary line is oval. The Toto is very 
nearly level, and might be called a gigantic 
raft. But a raft is a crude affair, and this is 
not. Other considerations lead us to think 
of the Toto as a great ferry-boat. It is a 
ferry-boat worthy of its line ! How solid and 
firm the structure beneath our feet ! Is there 
anything here that would give way in a 
storm? Are we shut up within the walls of 
a paltry ship, "cabined, cribbed, confined," 
breathing the foul air which forms the all- 
pervading spirit of a tipsy vessel ? No ; we 
walk these open streets as we would tread 
Broadway. When we are out at sea we 
shall get a smell of the ocean, sometimes 
a sight, but not a taste! not a taste of the 
filthy brine! 

The Toto appears to the mind at first to 
be of a prodigious length, but in reality the 
most prodigious dimension of the Toto is 
its width, and not its length. When vessels 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 123 

400 or 500 feet long were built in great 
numbers, it would have required only four 
of those 500 feet vessels in one straight line 
to exceed the length of the Toto. To fill 
out the width, and cover an area of water 
equal to that covered by the Toto, quite a 
number more would have been required. But 
there were plenty of them. The twenty thou- 
sand vessels afloat in 1877, if massed into 
groups of the size of a Toto, would have 
shown the ability of mankind at that period 
to have constructed, not merely one Toto, 
but many Totos. 

All great structures, the vast bridges, tow- 
ering buildings, etc., do not seem so gigantic 
when built as they do beforehand, when we 
contemplate their proposed enormous dimen- 
sions in figures. Everything outdoors appears 
more tremendous when considered indoors 
than it does when we go out and look upon 
it. Outdoors we see it in its natural position, 



134 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

we get a correct idea of its real size ; that 
is, its relative bigness. Comparing it with 
its surroundings, no great bridge ever seems 
too large ; we are beholding it in its ele- 
ment. When we behold the Toto in its 
element, far from land, and compare it with 
its surroundings will it seem too large? 
No, indeed ! 

Cities upon land extend for miles in length 
and miles in breadth, while this little city is 
only 600 yards in length and 300 yards in 
breadth, only one-eighteenth of a square 
mile. 

Let us go to the lower end of Manhattan 
Island, the point of New York City which 
used to be called the Battery, and go on 
board the Toto there. Totos are mainly 
alike, but that one is at a point of historic 
interest. 

We go. 

Here we are, where Castle Garden used 



MR. GfffM'S DREAM. 125 

to loom up, in the gloiy of its rotundity 
looking far more formidable than the Battery 
which crouched behind it. This is the place 
where Jenny Lind sang, rendering Castle 
Garden one of the scenes of story and song. 
It became the very first objective point of 
many travellers from foreign lands. The 
Battery faded and brightened, and faded 
again until it brightened up with a new 
light when from this spot the first and only 
original Toto took its new departure to 
gladden the vision of the assembled millions 
who saw it going and coming. America 
saw it going, and England afterward saw it 
coming. All England would rather have 
walked to their Land's End than to have 
missed that sublime spectacle. But the sight 
is too common now to be remarkable. 
What is a new city, in any land, after one has 
seen a hundred ? What is a new city on the 
water after one has seen a hundred? When 



126 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

this old land was new, however, when it was 
Young America, the Toto was said to be a 
" big thing." It was an elephant, some de- 
clared. It was a whale, thought others. 
But the elephant, when trained, was appre- 
ciated. The whale was valuable, and not a 
man was taken into that whale who did not 
come out again in a few days, without even 
having been sick in the stomach. 

We find that very little iron is used in 
the construction of the Toto. There is 
some, but not a great deal. There is more 
than would be sufficient to make one steel 
pen, but not so much that any person would 
ever think of saying that the Toto is built 
of iron. The principal material is much 
lighter, yet very tough and durable. It is a 
substance which for a long time was manu- 
factured only in sheets, forming an article 
remarkably strong for its thickness, and called 
paper. When its utility jumped from simple 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 



127 



paper to car-wheels, taking in small boats on 
the way, it was found suitable for convey- 
ances of any size, by land or water, from the 
smallest toy to the support of a ponderous 
railroad train ; from paper boats to a Toto 
on paper. 

These houses on the Toto are built of 
chemically prepared wood, and will not burn. 
So are the pavements. Every material com- 
prising any portion of the Toto is incom- 
bustible. Whatever was by nature inciner- 
able has been so treated that combustion is 
impossible. No person even who is liable 
to spontaneous combustion has ever succeeded 
in getting on board a Toto now we may 
be sure that all fire is amply guarded against. 

When standing on any one of the streets 
of the Toto, we may say we are on deck 
Standing on the flat roof which extends over, 
each block of houses, we may say we are on 
the promenade-deck, As the freest winds 



128 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

are harmless to the strong Toto, it has noth- 
ing that could rightly be termed a hurricane- 
deck. The portion of the Toto beneath the 
houses and streets may be called the hold. 
In the space down there the Toto carries 
merchandise: up here, in airy houses, people. 
The hold is reached through capacious open- 
ings in the courtyard of each block, the 
street pavements being left unbroken for 
travel. 

How is the Toto steered ? How is the rud- 
der of so ponderous a vessel swung? From 
a pilot-house located well forward, in the top 
of a tower, the Toto is guided, easily guided, 
yielding readily to the touch of one man, for 
his arm is aided by a mechanical appliance 
a thousand arms strong. As the little finger 
of an organ player can thrill the mightiest 
instrument of music if aided by mechanical 
power, so can the arm of a pilot sway the helm 
of the mightiest instrument of travel. The 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 129 

Great Eastern was easily steered by one 
finger, with the assistance of a steam con- 
trivance. There is no difficulty in steering a 
Toto. 

All of the houses (except the lofty pilot- 
house) are of a uniform height ; the flat 
roofs are alike ; and thus each square is fitly 
topped off with a promenade-deck. Here 
are chairs for those who wish to sit ; here 
is space for those who wish to walk ; and 
here is a railing around. 

Hotels comprise a large portion of the 
houses on the Toto. Every house is crammed. 
But the cool sea breeze will play around and 
into and through them with such a ventilat- 
ing effect, it will wholly dispel the obnoxious 
ideas pertaining * to a crammed house on 
land. A hotel quietly standing on the 
heated earth and a hotel carried forward 
over the cool sea differ widely. People 
huddle together by instinct whenever the air 



130 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

is cool, to obtain comfortable warmth. And 
here upon the Toto, what if every house is 
crammed full ? " The more the merrier ! '' 
Crowd on, young hearts, crowd on, and we 
will keep each other warm. We shall not 
need to clutch a wet railing, or put our arms 
around a cold mast, or hug an iron capstan, 
to save our lives, and after all embrace each 
other in dying misery ; but, glowing with the 
perennial life of health and happiness and 
security, we shall throng the streets of the 
Toto by day, and pack ourselves into its 
houses at night with a nearness that will be 
comfortable and cosy. 

These streets will not be obstructed by 
teams after the Toto has started. Vehicles 
will not be needed in this little city. There 
will be plenty of room for human locomotion. 

We notice but one apothecary shop in 
town. The invigorating effect of the sea air 
will be so potent it will tone up every system 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 131 

to a physical point where physic will not be 
required. 

The climate is so salubrious on the Toto 
at sea that the rate of mortality is very 
small. In every town of this size, of course, 
deaths will sometimes occur ; yet this little city 
is so delightfully healthy that its population 
is generally larger at the end of the passage 
than at the beginning. There are six jolly 
doctors on board, to one cadaverous under- 
taker and one forlorn druggist. 

The sea air is so stimulating that no greater 
stimulation is desired, and the happiness of 
a journey on the Toto is so intoxicating 
that no sublimer intoxication is possible. 
Every one admits this openly. Therefore, 
upon the Toto there are no grog-shops visible 
to the naked eye. No one but a person 
under the strain of arduous duties will be 
expected to need the aid of inebriation. The 
only man supposed to drink whiskey is the 
pilot. 



i 3 a MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

Every Toto has a name, and this one's 
name is Jonah. 

We are to cross the Atlantic on this Toto. 
In a few days we shall walk off into another 
republic. 

During the whole passage we need not 
see the ocean if we choose not. But, under 
the circumstances, we shall delight to see it. 
Every day we shall take a stroll to the 
suburbs to see the sea. People who are so 
fortunate as to occupy those elegant houses 
upon the border of the Toto can view the 
ocean from their windows, but the rest of 
us will often walk out to that elliptical 
street on which those houses front, and there 
we shall look out upon the "gray and mel- 
ancholy waste," and listen to its grand and 
ceaseless roar. It will not seem so gray 
and melancholy as it did to some who lived 
before us. 

Noah did not have a Toto. Notwith- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 



'33 



standing it took him 120 years to build his 
structure, an ark 450 feet in length, seven- 
ty-five in width, and forty-five in height, was 
a smaller thing than some of the vessels 
that were bobbing around in 1877. How- 
ever huge for Noah's day of small things, it 
would seem small for this day of huge 
things. The Toto is of quite a different shape 
as well as size. And it ought to be. The 
water which Noah encountered was mostly 
from above ; the water we encounter is 
mostly underneath ; so we can have plenty 
of ventilation without water in ours. 

Through the Narrows our ocean vehicle 
can reach the ocean from the bay without 
difficulty; and it might with even another 
Toto on each side, for a Toto is only one- 
sixth the width of the Narrows, and the 
water is of immense depth. 

Here we go, sailing out through this deep 
strait, meeting and passing another Toto in 
the narrowest part of the Narrows. 



i 3 4 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

The shallowest point in the whole channel 
from New York to the sea is no less than 
22 feet deep at low tide. And this is a soft 
bottom. If the channel at any point were 
not deep enough for the Toto, it could be 
made deep enough ! and kept deep enough ! 
In the Narrows the depth of water ranges 
from 40 to 116 feet at low tide. 

We steadily advance, emerging from the 
lower bay, and moving out so quietly upon 
that rolling prairie of water that we seem to 
be borne along on a floating island, a thickly 
populated little island, which grows smaller 
and smaller in appearance, even to us who 
are upon it, as we are carried further and 
further out upon the broad field of the sea. 

Any given distance looks so much less 
upon the water than upon the land, that the 
dimensions of the Toto out here on the 
water do not seem so great as we had 
naturally supposed. Gaining permission to 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 135 

go up that tower to the pilot-house, we first 
look out upon the Toto, then around upon 
the ocean, and this structure looks much 
smaller than we could ever have imagined 
a structure to appear when it is 600 yards 
long and 300 yards wide. Too big? It 
looks almost too little ! 

What moves the Toto? This is the most 
important question pertaining to it ? When 
it was first put, it was in this form : What 
can move the Toto ? Many pronounced the 
query unanswerable. They said that the 
Toto could be built, but never could be oper- 
ated. The author of the Toto anticipated 
their objection, and met it squarely before- 
hand, in this way : If a small object can be 
moved through water by mechanical power, 
it only needs great mechanical power to 
move a great object. Even less proportional 
power is required to drive a large vessel 
than a small one of the same shape. 



136 MR. GfffM'S DREAM. 

The Toto is not of the same shape ; a 
broad structure moves through water at a 
disadvantage regarding power ; but what is 
that compared to the immeasurable advan- 
tage of safety and comfort! Whatever 
amount of power is requisite to move the 
Toto, the power can be supplied. There 
is nothing so great, which man can put 
together, but man can move it by steam. 
A large aggregation of matter only requires a 
large aggregation of power to move it. Steam 
will move the Toto. If any superior motor 
shall be devised in the future, the Toto will 
use it, whether it be cold vapor, warm heat, 
spiritualism, wet dryness, perfect fluid, sunlight, 
moonshine, wave motion, will power, yeast, 
natural affinity, slander, the tide, the ballot, 
perpetual motion, woman suffrage, odd force, 
or any other odd force. But steam is adequate 
to the propulsion of any bulk through the 
readily yielding fluid water. When the Toto 



MR. GJTSM'S DREAM. 137 

is ready to start, we will brighten up those 
jolly fires below, wake up the screw propellers 
to a lively sense of duty, get up a revolution 
among them, and travel by the method of pro- 
pulsion now in vogue swimming ahead by 
twisting the heels. We might have sails, with 
no fear that the wind would tip us over ; but 
the appliances for sails would be cumbersome ; 
we shall use steam. A few halting minds will 
still doubt that the Toto will ever move. Let 
their conservative souls be harried by the re- 
flection that their greatest grandfathers thought 
it absurd to suppose that steam could move 
the smallest vessel ; ridiculous to entertain the 
notion that we could burn black stones to 
warm our houses, and a mere gas to light 
them ; folly to believe that we could ever send 
a message to a distant land with lightning 
speed. The world moves and the world is a 
great deal larger than the Toto. The world of 
thought moves. The power that moves it 



138 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

now will move it in the future, continuing its 
progress through all time. Ability which put 
the first small ship upon its course is working 
yet, and will discover means to satisfy man's 
growing wants. The field of invention has 
not been trampled down. Vast plains of im- 
provement are barely touched. Rising in par- 
tial obscurity, loom gigantic mountains yet to 
be scaled, whose peaks will be carved by 
explorers into enduring monuments of fame. 
Our descendants will not envy us for having 
lived in so apt an age for invention ; the 
greatest results of searching thought are yet to 
come ; the brightest pages in the history of 
mankind's progress will be written in the 
future. Nature is inexhaustible. The Toto 
shall move, as truly as Galileo's earth moved. 
The many who doubted that were ancestors of 
those who will doubt this. Builders of bob- 
bing things called ships, now let us have a 
Toto! 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 139 

That was in 1877. 

When the leaven had worked sufficiently 
the Toto was forthcoming, and its success 
when once upon the ocean was immediate, 
going beyond the greatest expectations of 
conservatives and flush with the highest 
hopes of enthusiastic builders. The Toto 
was so thoroughly unique in its design, 
bringing with it such a new departure from 
all previous modes of travelling, that its advent 
was the event of the century. 

O, that day ! when the first Toto moved ! 
Moved from New York to cross the ocean ! 
What multitudes pressed to the Battery, 
crammed every street for miles above, 
covered every hill slope, commanding a 
view of the bay ! Millions were gath- 
ered within that horizon ! Square miles 
of people ! Humans in groups of countless 
hundreds of thousands, all with their hearts 
full, looked upon that sight, and wept. The 



140 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

sensation was too intense for calm and cold 
endurance. It was a stirring, swelling, rous- 
ing motive, which nothing less than the 
pageantry of war could rival. And this was 
a peaceful accomplishment, undeniably worthy, 
and solidly useful. The shining emblems of 
the glory of refined barbarity, modern war, 
plated savagery, which rears itself in triumph 
over desolation and deadness and sadness, 
did not glitter here. To act the studied part 
of gaudy splendor would not have height- 
ened the simple majesty of this occasion. 
Its grandeur rose above all meretricious 
adornment. The noble spirit of Destruction, 
with all the prestige of its honored prow- 
ess, with all its pride of the homage paid 
to its usefulness in the past, began to per- 
ceive that its mission among enlightened 
people was waning ; the world at last was 
uniting, nations were understanding each 
other, and all were becoming engrossed by 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 141 

the nobler spirit of Construction. This 
country had just emerged from a labor 
crisis. Unemployed thousands of men, in 
these hard times, had run the risky gauntlet 
of vagrancy on one hand and useless over- 
production on the other, till hoarded capital 
in abundance was poured out for their em- 
ployment in building a Toto. That was a 
move toward thrift, a successful move toward 
instant thrift, restoring the equilibrium of labor 
at once by commencing this urgently needed 
work. Enforced idleness was relieved ; wast- 
ing lives were turned to account ; and the 
darkness of that peculiarly dangerous juncture 
passed away. The domain of work had now 
been enlarged ; every man had something to 
do ; all were earning and spending money ; 
business arose like the sun rising into a clear 
day ; the nation prospered again. The first 
swim of the first Toto brought the grand holi- 
day! There was universal joy. Every buoy- 



142 MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

ant nature felt inspired, and every nature for 
the nonce was buoyant. Gladness reigned. 
Usefulness had won! The Toto at last ex- 
isted, and was majestically moving upon its 
course, beginning its career of unexampled 
usefulness ! As millions of eyes gazed upon 
that sublime spectacle, millions of hearts were 
wrought up till those eyes could see no longer. 
The greatness of the event was too impressive 
for stolid indifference. All were bright, gay, 
jubilant. And more : Their minds were ex- 
panded, strengthened, ennobled. Up into the 
realm of useful endeavor, profitable work, 
noble enterprise, every soul was lifted by the 
achievement those millions beheld. They saw 
the token of a new era dawning. The ease of 
travel now across the rough Atlantic, the 
mingling of all the peoples of Europe in their 
suddenly augmented flow through every inter- 
vening country to reach the Toto, their 
friendly communion everywhere in drifting 



MR. GfffM'S DREAM. 143 

back to their homes, the healthful mixture of 
every shade of opinion and feeling as the result 
of this new impetus to travel, the mental ex- 
pansion, the enlightenment, the sweeping 
away of old prejudices, the real progress, the 
improvement of the intellect, was to elevate 
the tone of the world, create a community of 
interests, unite all lands by centering their pro- 
gressive thought upon one great object. The 
Toto in mid-ocean was a hyphen connecting 
the Old world with the New. It had drawn 
upon itself the attention of every civilized 
nation possessing a sea-coast, and in their com- 
bined scrutiny of this one object, and their 
united admiration of its worth, all dropped the 
less worthy enterprises of wholesale human 
destruction, and devoted their surplus energies 
to the construction of Totos. Idle display was 
flung to the winds, and works of usefulness 
commenced. The new ear was begun. 

On that memorable day, when the first 



144 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Toto was moving, was gliding seaward the 
focus of glances by millions, and there were 
flowing toward it the acclamations of that 
host, that measureless array of gazers from 
hilltops above hilltops and the Jersey and 
island shores, there was also flowing through 
countless brains a little rhyme; not poetry, 
but rhyme : 

This is the Toto which Vanderbilt built, 
Which Vanderbilt built, 
Which Vanderbilt built, 
Built to advance mankind ! 
He answered the people's unanimous call, 
In misery all, 
Replete with gall, 
Needing a ship of this kind. 

Seasick and perishing thousands cried out; 
He heard the shout, 
He brought this about, 
Taking a hint not the slyest. 
His wonderful genius for organization 
And administration 
Moved every nation, 
Lifting America highest! 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 145 

When he enlisted ;he men and the means 
He wrought such scenes 
As kings and queens 
And angels came to see ; 
Honoring this above all other lands 
With ocean sands; 
And now it stands 
Peerless regarding the sea! 

The Toto's a vessel that's strong and staunch 
From root to branch; 
And with it we launch 
An era no man can stop. 
Here on this day it is plainly shown, 
And soon will be known 
From zone to zone,, 
This side of the globe is the top / 

Of course there was a great deal of poetry 
also floating around in those times, upon the 
same subject. 

Now we are travelling splendidly. All on 
board are comfortable, and are safe, albeit on 
the ocean. There is nothing flimsy about 
this conveyance for the sea. This is no 



i 4 6 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

flighty basket in the air. We are not at 
the mercy of fickle currents of wind. We 
are not sailing off promiscuously among 
the stars, a little globe of our own. We 
are making the most of our advantages 
in taking the water for a support, instead 
of overlooking that matter, getting above 
such a thing, kiting away from our sphere, 
roaming an uncomfortable region, hung high 
in the air to a bag of gas, a thing that 
may easily break, turning aeronauts into 
aerolites, compelling them to end their fast 
trip in a life-boat, sailing vertically from 
the sky to the sea. A balloon is a grand 
plaything, and people may go to sea with 
that conveyance without being seasick ; but, 
for the multitude to travel with the least 
expense and with the greatest comfort, it is 
manifestly safer as well as cheaper to take 
the best foundation obtainable. For travel- 
ling over land it is the earth itself, and for 



MR. GffSM'S DREAM. 147 

travelling over the sea it is the water. The 
ground will freely support the heaviest bas- 
ket or car. The air will not furnish such 
support ; costly means are required to hold 
it up. Therefore any method of traversing 
the upper regions must be at a disadvan- 
tage. 

The Toto is substantial. Its advance is 
sure. There is no conceivable obstacle. 

The winds? We need not fear that any 
wind which will ever blow can tip over this 
great raft, or injure a fibre of its solid sub- 
stance. 

The waves? At the touch of the Toto 
the highest waves fall, and the hardy swim- 
mer glides over their soft and loose and 
yielding bodies easily. 

But the rocks? Will not the Toto run 
upon unyielding rocks, and will not the 
sharp rocks puncture the life out of the 
Toto? Impossible. If the Toto should by 



148 . MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

accident become unmanageable, and be car- 
ried astray, the monster could not be demol- 
ished by anything it met. Of course the 
Toto is built in water-tight sections, that a 
leak in any part would not ingulf the whole. 
A ship of the old style might be divided 
into any number of water-tight compart- 
ments, yet what were they, all united, but 
simply one ? It was but one poor, weak, 
light, paltry thing, to be tossed about upon 
the water as a unit, with all its united com- 
partments. A single wave could grasp it, 
and the whole was gone ! One billow could 
seize it as though it were a bubble, and lift 
it high, and fling it, one whole toy, upon the 
jagged rocks, every compartment then divid- 
ing and subdividing, all together dashing and 
crashing into the scattered flinders of a com- 
plete wreck! But the Toto could not be 
thus acted upon. If haply it were disabled, 
it would merely drift ; slowly drift ; quietly 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 149 

drift. The ocean could not concentrate suf- 
ficient power to destroy it. No billow could 
lift it, no wave could sink it, no iceberg 
could crush it. The monster would steadily 
drift ; and, wherever it might float, there is 
not a rock that could destroy it. The Toto 
would drift until it touched, and there it 
would stay until its constitutional disabilities 
were removed, when its course could be 
directed elsewhere. If the gigantic vessel 
were madly driven with all its force upon 
the hugest rock, and one of its compart- 
ments wholly smashed, yet the wounded mon- 
ster would remain not a thing to be flung 
away by the angry Neptune even then. Or 
if, peradventure, the Toto should blindly rush 
into collision with another Toto, still the two 
great fellows could not annihilate each other 
with one blow. Always retaining such im- 
mense strength in reserve, the vast resources 
of each would enable it to live and move. 



J5o MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

It would not die by one stroke, however 
crippled. 

Here upon the Toto we cannot but think 
of the way our early fathers travelled : sail- 
ing on a quiet river or a placid lake in a 
thing which the ripples could not in the 
least disturb, yet bobbing out upon the sea 
in a shell that a single wave might over- 
power. 

And now we are ready to answer in a 
thoroughly practical manner the fervid old 
conundrum : 

"Why do the roaring ocean 

And the night wind, cold and bleak, 
As they beat at the heart of the mother, 
Drive the color from her cheek ? " 

Simply because when the bleak winds blow so, 
Her boy at sea is not on a Toto. 

In this connection we bethink ourselves 
of another puzzling newspaper paragraph we 
read in the olden time : 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 151 

"A sea stove in the bark Mary Jane let the water 
into her; and she went to the bottom." 

People in reading that used to ask what 
sort of a thing a sea stove was, and how it 
let the water in. The idea that human beings 
would go to sea in a structure so frail that 
the sea could stave it in, was incredible to 
some people, and yet it was true. The nu- 
merous wrecks in those times caused the 
people to send out fearful howls as well as 
dreadful barks ; they issued more than five 
thousand barks before there was one Toto. 

As we move steadily forward on the ocean, 
and distance begins to lend enchantment to 
the view of the land we are leaving, our 
thoughts embrace the far-off time when a ves- 
sel called the Great Eastern was launched 
upon the sea. We remember what was then 
considered its immensity, and how we laughed. 
We remember, too, how we marvelled at its 
non-success as a passenger vessel. But now, 



152 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

when we have climbed to the top of our house 
upon the Toto, stepped out upon its level 
roof, and taken chairs for an hour to enjoy the 
delicious breeze from the watery plain before 
us, we think the matter over, and we seem to 
see the cause of the Great Easterns failure: 
As human beings are slow to risk themselves 
where they think the chances of life are doubt- 
ful, it is not strange that a larger vessel than 
usual of the old-fashioned shape appeared un- 
wieldy, and therefore unsafe. What a contrast 
between that great little thing and this ! 
When we look around upon the Toto, and see 
the breadth as well as length, giving it the 
appearance as well as the fact of solidity and 
strength ; when we think what an area is cov- 
ered by this level giant, rendering the waves 
puny in comparison and powerless, we no 
longer wonder that people were shy of a mon- 
ster of the old shape, whose size made it only 
look cumbersome without adding to its safety. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 153 

The Toto is a horse of a different color, and 
carries every one without fear. 

We are now well out upon the Atlantic ; 
not " half seas over," nor anything like it, 
but we are making steady progress ; and the 
question arises, not "To be or not to be?" 
as it used to, nor " How long will it take 
to get across ? " but " How long will this 
delightful trip last ? " The fleetest vessels 
used to cross the Atlantic in nine days. 
Occasionally one would make a quicker pas- 
sage ; the steamer City of Berlin arrived in 
New York, Sept. 25, 1875, in 7 days and 18 
hours from Queenstown ; and returned in 7 
days, 15 hours; and 48 minutes, actual time, 
from New York to Queenstown ; but the 
usual time for the fastest steamers was nine 
days. Those nine days, trien and there, 
seemed longer than nine weeks would, now 
and here. So we are not in a hurry. With 
the comforts of a sea-voyage on the Toto, 



154 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

the urgent desire for swift-sailing vessels 
ended. Naturally enough. Put a man in a 
nice place, and he is not in a hurry to leave 
it ; the Toto is a nice place to spend a few 
weeks, and mankind are not in a hurry to 
leave it We may be three weeks on the 
way. They will be the pleasantest three 
weeks of our lives. If it were desired to 
make a quicker passage, the Toto could take 
us across in nine days, or even less. But 
we should have to pay the Toto much 
moneys. For nothing is so expensive as 
speed. It costs a great deal to keep even 
one man going if he is fast And in every 
kind of locomotion in every body through- 
out the universe, whatever is gained in speed 
is lost in power. To a body moving through 
water, the resistance increases with the speed 
in a compound ratio. That is, unless the 
theory of " stream lines " proves that water 
offers no resistance to bodies moving through 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 155 

it. In which case, it will only be necessary 
to substitute some other word for. "resist- 
ance." It certainly requires power to push 
the smoothest vessel through the most "per- 
fect fluid." As matter in every other form 
offers resistance to the passage of bodies 
through it (in addition to friction), it seems 
as though if water does not it ought to. 
Air is a much lighter fluid than water, 800 
times lighter, yet the resistance of mere air, 
in a tornado, is greater than the power of 
man to walk against it. Is it mere friction ? 
By giving the Toto a large share of our 
back pay, he would put us through the waves 
to Europe quickly. But we are not running 
away from our own country ; we do not care 
to make the journey in a shorter time than 
three weeks. With comfottable houses to 
live in, pleasant streets to travel in, a boule- 
vard around the whole, where we may walk, 
talk, run, play, sit, sing, think, drink, wink, 



'56 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

blink, go to the brink, and never sink, nor 
shrink why, we are living atthe seaside! 

We do not want to hasten away. We 
have gone to a watering-place to spend a 
few weeks. No matter if it should be two 
months. We are happy. We are tranquil 
We are not jeopardizing our lives. We 
are not even imperilling our equanimity. 
We are not seeking health and finding none. 
We are not studying geometry by walking 
up and down an inclined plane, or studying 
natural philosophy to know how to do it. 
We are moving in a bee-line, with friendly 
stomachs, cheerful faces, placid tempers, light 
hearts, untroubled bodies, and contented 
souls. This is all due to the Toto. 

The Toto has been so great a boon to 
emigrants galore, that here and now and 
often every day upon the Toto we hear their 
voices rising by the thousand as they sing 
the grand old song: 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. . 157 

" We are out on an ocean sailing, 

Homeward bound we smoothly glide ; 
We are out on an ocean sailing, 
To a home beyond the tide ! 

" Millions now are safely landed 

Over on the golden shore ; 
Millions more are on their journey, 

Yet there's room for millions more ! " 

Before the Toto came into being, away 
back there in the nineteenth century, when 
the idea of building a Toto was first suggest- 
ed, what a stir it created ! The very idea 
touched the world like a bombshell. Many 
believed the whole thing had exploded into 
a million fragments. And so it had ; but it 
had done its work. 

At first, like all new enterprises, it met 
conservative criticism. Fogies declared that 
to build a Toto was too great an under- 
taking : but the masses of this progressive 
people began to compare the undertaking 
with Neptune's undertaking, and decided to 



158 MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

favor the Toto. Knowing ones called the 
idea a mere speculation. Sellers told buyers 
" There's millions in it !" Unbelievers went 
down into their grave graves, taking the old 
hulks along with 'them, gravely singing 
" Hold on ; don't give up the ship for the 
Toto." Some would not give up the ship, 
and the ship gave up them. Nothing less 
than a Toto was suitable for crossing the 
ocean. Until the advent of the Toto, every 
ship had been called feminine, a she. They 
were all weaker vessels, and never should 
have been put to such hard work as many 
of them had to undergo. Poor things, 
their powers of endurance were tested beyond 
all reasonable bounds, and they lost their 
lives, many of them. Ah ! too small-waisted, 
too fragile and frail, were those weaker ves- 
sels. A stronger vessel came. The Toto 
was a he ! Neptune and he agreed with 
each other immediately, and have had no 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 159 

trouble since. With the other vessels, there 
was frequently a general falling out. 

When it was decided to build a Toto, and 
builders mooted a way to build it, some de- 
clared it a problem. It proved to be no 
problem at all. A simple granite mole was 
built, in the form of a letter U, the two 
ends running out into the water; then, with 
a coffer-dam connecting the two ends, and 
the water pumped out, nothing was easier 
than to build the Toto inside of this im- 
mense dry dock. When it was finished they 
removed the coffer-dam, and the boat was 
ready to start, like any ferry-boat from its U 
shaped dock. 

Behold that gracefully sweeping line of 
houses on the Toto, facing its outer street, 
extending around the diminutive city, three- 
quarters of a mile, a curvilinear row of the 
best hotels and private dwellings. All front- 
ing directly upon the ocean, all possess a 



160 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

location which is superb. Every one looks 
pleasantly down on the water. Their faces 
are lines of beauty, perfect curves, and are 
lovely. Neptune tries his best to kiss them, 
but he never succeeds. He dances around 
before them all ; he is as fascinatingly grace- 
ful as the monster can be ; now and then he 
reaches up as high as he can, but they hold 
up their faces higher, refusing his eager ad- 
vances, quietly mocking the old fellow's pre- 
sumptuous rudeness. They seem to like it, 
too, and sweetly smile upon him constantly. 
Well, they are too good for him, and he 
knows it if he knows anything. But he 
seems always yearning toward them, and 
they return his every glance, in a harmless 
kind of flirtation. There is very little love 
lost between them. 

Every room in every house on the Toto 
is lighted by gas, and in winter is warmed 
by steam from one common source of sup- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 161 

ply. The system of sewerage resembles that 
of a city on land. Ingeniously constructed 
valves at the outlets prevent the inward flow 
of the waves. Comfort and cleanliness are 
well provided for. The Toto is a pleasant 
little city to dwell in. During the summer 
it is agreeably cool, and in winter warmer 
than the cold cities on land, for the gr$at 
body of water beneath it maintains a more 
equable temperature than the great body of 
baking and freezing dirt on which mankind 
chiefly resides. 

In former times people all resided on the 
land, only one-fourth of the surface of the 
globe, regarding the other three-fourths as a 
carriage-way, on which they could generally 
cross from one continent to another, by 
jouncing along all the way. When a ca- 
tastrophe occurred on the road, all whom it 
did not silence forever it petrified for a 
time, in their amazement that the little bit 



1 62 MR, GHIM'S DREAM. 

of a thing they had sent out to jolt over 
that rough road to Europe, had gone to 
smash. It seemed strange that so nice a 
little carriage, made expressly, put together 
so closely, water-tight in every part, well 
painted, varnished, garaished, provided with 
the richest upholstery, could start for Europe 
and come to naught. And they sent out 
another just like her. 

A majority of the people on the Toto 
are passengers, but there are persons who 
have lavished money on apartments for the 
summer. And there are others so charmed 
with a life on the ocean wave in a mascu- 
line ship, they enjoy its delights the year 
round. 

Little did the builders of the first Toto 
surmise what an institution they founded. 
Enthusiastic as they were, it was impossible 
for any mortal man in that day to grasp the 
whole breadth of the future in his freest con- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 163 

ception ; the reality outruns the wildest esti- 
mates of those who favored progress on the 
ocean. They put upon the sea a Toto ; no 
lesser article would satisfy existing wants. 
Looking beyond, they could not measure or 
conjecture the entire sweep of its useful- 
ness; they could only see the future grandly 
growing ! 



Now let us take a backward leap from 
the distant future, and view the subject from 
the standpoint of our time. 

The Toto is the coming ship. No pro- 
gressive man will doubt it, upon reflection. 
Conservatives will treat the matter with 
scorn. So be it. Even the most advanced 
and practical of thinking minds will receive 
the startling idea with a grin; but calcula- 
tion will remove all doubt concerning the 
feasibility of the plan. 



164 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

The advent of the Toto will be an epoch, 
beginning the glorious era of man's reign 
over Neptune. Until that time, Neptune 
will reign over man. But the change is to 
occur. Whether the people of this gener- 
ation shall honor themselves by that grand 
event, or allow it to slip into the hands of 
those who are to come with outstretched 
fingers ready to grasp it, let this generation 
determine. The world's widening future will 
certainly take it in. Shall the present age 
neglect a grand opportunity? The Toto is 
conceived, and the time is coming when it 
will surely be produced. The world's long 
future, without a Toto, would be a dismal 
future indee'd. If the existing peril and misery 
of ocean travel were perpetuated through all 
coming time, what a progressive people 
would traverse this planet ! 

A railroad across the American continent, 
3,000 miles, was built, and has become in- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 165 

dispensable. When easy transit across the 
Atlantic Ocean is attained, it will likewise 
be regarded as indispensable. Constructing 
that long railroad to California has obviated 
the misery of a sea-voyage around to that 
distant region. If a railroad for a like pur- 
pose in the other direction to Europe- 
were practicable, it would undoubtedly be 
constructed. A railroad extending 3,000 miles 
does not seem too great an undertaking, 
though the average cost of 3,000 miles of 
railway, in this country, is $165,348,000. But, 
instead of a structure 3,000 miles in length, 
a neat little thing only 600 yards long and 
300 yards wide will be sufficient for the pur- 
pose of crossing the ocean steadily, and will 
be infinitely safer than any railroad ever built 
in any land. Three thousand miles of rail- 
way comprise a much greater structure than 
it seems in actually looking at it, for only a 
small portion is visible at any one point of 



1 66 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

observation. It is an immensely long structure, 
much longer than the Toto. The Toto is 
wider, but the width of the Toto is not nearly 
so great in proportion, as the length of the 
railroad. If 3,000 miles of railway, with all 
its appurtenances, were massed together, piled 
up on a piece of ground 600 yards long and 
300 yards wide, the greatness of that bulk 
would be astounding! The amount of ma- 
terial used in 3,000 miles of railway, together 
with its shops and stations and grand central 
depots and rolling stock and paraphernalia, 
if it could all be seen in one huge pile, 
would be so enormous that even the Toto 
would look petty beside it. Yet that im- 
mense pile of railway iron and wood, &c., 
costing over 165,000,000 of dollars, would 
represent only 3,000 miles of railway, while 
railways in this country alone have in some 
recent years been increasing at the rate 
of 8,000 miles a year, at an expense of more 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 167 

than $400,600,000 a year! In the United 
States we have now 73,000 miles of railway ; 
let us have 600 yards of Toto. 

Place it upon that most important route, 
that route which is necessarily travelled a 
great deal now in spite of its discomforts, 
and the easy-going Toto on that extensively 
used ferry will be the right masculine in 
the right place. 

The ocean telegraph was a worthy and 
noble undertaking. Millions were ventured 
in support of the doubtful project, the un- 
certain enterprise became a grand success, 
and now for several years men have been 
shooting their ideas across the ocean. Dur- 
ing those same years many of the same 
men have betaken themselves to the other 
side. Some have not been able to get 
half way across; most have succeeded, after 
a fashion (and what a fashion !) in reaching 
the destination they desired. But think 



1 68 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

what they have all been doing on the 
way : Extolling the merits of the ocean 
cable, thinking what a grand advance had 
been made by man at the bottom of the 
sea, yet never thinking what a grander ad- 
vance might be made by man at the top 
of the sea. Glad of such a good way to 
get their thoughts carried, while despairing 
of any good way to get their bodies and 
souls carried. Progressive age! 

It is only a few years since the ocean 
telegraph was undertaken and sneered at as 
impossible, yet now there are more than 
50,000 miles of submarine telegraph in 
use. 

Public buildings grow more stupendous ; 
ocean steamers merely increase in number ; 
the largest are mere trifles in a storm. One 
of the many passenger lines across the 
Atlantic numbers twenty-seven steamers. 

If all the dead ships could be raised from 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 169 

their deep graves, it would be found that 
more materials were used in their construction 
than would have sufficed to build a dozen 
Totos; and there is money enough likewise 
at the bottom of the sea to have furnished 
them all more sumptuously than any first- 
class steamship extant above the waves. The 
legion of vessels lost are beyond redemption. 
A multitude of living ships are going in the 
old road to destruction. Ships are now 
building in the same old way ; thousands of 
vessels are at this moment taking the old 
form ; thousands more are yet to be built, 
in the scattered little shipyards of the world, 
upon the same old fatal pattern, endowed 
with that same weakness that has proved so 
often frailty, and launched upon the roughest 
tide of life, to meet with premature death. 

If a housebuilder saw his house sink into 
the earth, he would build no more houses 
without considering well the foundation. 



170 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Builders of vessels, consider the foundation, 
and adapt the structure to it. Spread. Noth- 
ing narrow will hold its own upon a soft 
base. It is the widest and flattest weight 
which will sink the least and stand the firmest, 
on a foundation which is moist and soft. 
The ocean is moist and soft. Width, width 
is required in anything that would float 
securely upon it. 

Were a Toto now plying the ocean be- 
tween America and Europe, where are the 
fogies who would seek to place an injunction 
upon its movements? Who would wish to 
destroy its usefulness, give up the splendor 
of its greatness, lose forever the glory 
its presence would reflect upon mankind ? 
Where live the people who would prefer 
that there were no such structure, that they 
themselves should be compelled to use the 
means of transit in vogue before the Toto 
existed ? Who is the public-spirited man 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 171 

who would argue in favor of going back to 
the old, ridiculous method, painfully bobbing 
over the sea ? What nation possessing a 
Toto would throw away the boon ? What 
great government, on building and operating 
the first Toto, would not esteem it an honor, 
and proudly point to that evidence of the 
nation's advancement beyond every other 
maritime nation on earth ? If these are 
cogent reasons for holding on to the posses- 
sion of a Toto when built, they are solid 
arguments for building one. What great 
land with an ocean rolling up to its borders 
in loud defiance can stand the taunts of 
Neptune any longer? or afford to be behind 
in the coming struggle of nations for the 
first honors in the warfare against the com- 
mon enemy, Neptune ? 

Neptune is a big, strong fellow, and he 
wrestles with giant might, but the Toto can 
stand it all. Neptune has a great round 



i72 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

body, measuring 150,000,000 of square miles 
upon its surface, while the Toto will cover 
only one twenty-seven hundred millionth of 
it, yet the Toto will endure all its upheav- 
ings without getting agitated. 

The work of building a Toto is not so 
great as it might seem. Rearing an edifice 
to be used upon land, if it were desired to 
build the structure 600 yards long, builders 
would erect it without any thought of diffi- 
culty. Building a structure 600 yards by 
300 yards, for the land or the sea, is only a 
question of time. If the length were 600 
feet, it would be plainly feasible, as the 
Great Eastern is 680 feet. In building 
a bridge or any structure on a large 
scale, when it has been built 600 feet, 
another 600 feet can be built, can it not ? 
And another 600 feet can be added to it. 
That is the entire length of the Toto. Its 
width is only half. 



MR. GfflM'S DREAM. 173 

The means for building a Toto are 
plentiful, and running to waste. So many 
men are out of employment! So much 
money is out of employment ! Money and 
labor are the factors which carry out great 
enterprises. They are now ready and waiting. 
Not wanted anywhere, except in something 
new. All the old industries are full, and 
thousands of surplus workers are vainly 
seeking employment Machinery has taken 
the place of hand labor to such an extent 
that hosts of persons are squeezed out of 
every industrial pursuit. New enterprises 
must be opened up. Great enterprises. Now 
is the time for the largest enterprises to be in- 
augurated, for the means of carrying them 
forward are now most painfully yearning to 
be used. They have built many cities, 
large and small ; they can certainly build 
another. Just now they have nothing else 
to do, and ache to build the floating little 



174 MR - GHIM'S DREAM. 

city, the Toto. If Chicago were burned down 
again, they would build it again ; if the best 
part of Boston were burned down again, up 
they would build it again ; though either 
task would be greater than building a Toto ! 
Men are suffering keenly for want of em- 
ployment. Why shall not mechanics be fur- 
nished with mechanical labor ? They are 
told of unoccupied lands in the Western ter- 
ritories, millions of acres ; but those millions 
of acres are mostly mountain and desert; 
nearly all the good land is now occupied. 
Even were it not, agriculture affords little 
pleasure and less profit to mechanics. They 
feel no attraction toward unoccupied lands, 
and surely the unoccupied lands can get 
along without them. Unoccupied lands are 
not suffering for their services, but wretch- 
edly occupied oceans are. 

Men of money, a vast deal of wretched- 
ness will be prevented, on land as well as at 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 175 

sea, by giving a host of men employment in 
building a Toto. The project will always be 
in order henceforth, and just now it is par- 
ticularly timely. 

Construct a Toto, and you virtually bridge 
the ocean. That bridge will carry multitudes 
of persons who would never otherwise go 
across on account of the troubles and perils 
of the voyage. We all "speak well of the 
bridge that carries us safely over." And this 
induces others to come. Build a Toto, and 
ocean travel will be vastly increased. 

The patronage of the very first Toto will 
be equalled only by its capacity. Steamers 
of the old style will be left in the lurch. 
Travellers will flock to the Toto as they 
would rush from any danger to safety. If 
you choose to limit all persons on the great 
structure to the space they now enjoy on a 
first-class vessel, the capacity of a Toto will 
be immense. And it would be easier than 



176 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

on a rolling vessel to put up with the spacious- 
ness of a coffin for sleeping purposes. 

The feasibility of constructing a Toto will 
not be arrived at by any one who considers 
it merely an enlarged ship of the present 
style. It is an entirely different structure. 
Any person looking upon the huge black hull 
of the Great Eastern or any other steamer, and 
imagining a ship of that style, but of vastly 
increased dimensions, would naturally shake 
his head at the idea of building a boat so 
big. And well he might, for such a boat 
would not be practicable at all. It would 
draw too much water, to begin with, and 
for many other obvious reasons it would 
not be suitable. The Toto is projected upon 
a plan entirely new, with no reference to the 
little old shipbuilding plan which has proved 
such a perfect failure. 

The great width of the Toto is a feature 
which gives it immense advantage in the 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 177 

matter of strength. A vessel of the present 
long and narrow style is required to be built 
of the most carefully selected materials of 
the choicest quality, to give adequate strength 
to the slim thing, which sometimes is dashed 
to pieces. The Great Eastern, with 680 feet 
of length, has only 70 feet of width except 
at the paddle-boxes and the engines behind 
them, where the width is 107 feet. Its length 
enables it to travel smoothly when cutting 
the waves at right angles, and even to cross 
the waves diagonally with but little rocking. 
But alas for the Great Eastern in the trough 
of the sea ! It rolls prodigiously. Seldom 
does it get into that predicament, but the 
case has sometimes happened, and has proved 
the impotence of even the mightiest ship 
built upon the narrow principle. There is 
not width enough to that greatest of old-fash- 
ioned vessels to enable it to stand quietly 
on the ocean when the waves are coming 



178 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

broadside on. Then arises in the mind of 
the passenger a statement of the facetious 
ship-agent that lured him here : " Seasick- 
ness is unknown on board this vessel." 

The Toto will draw less water than some 
would suppose. A vessel of the existing 
narrow form, with its entire width tapering 
down to a narrow keel, must extend deep 
into the water ; but the Toto, broad at the 
bottom, and for the most part flat, cannot be 
pressed deep, unless excessively freighted. 

It might be averred that the Toto is too 
thin. That is, that the vertical thickness of 
a structure spreading so wide, and not ex- 
tending to a remarkable depth, would not 
give it sufficient strength, and that a vessel 
of the old style is really of a stouter form 
than the widespreading Toto. This would 
be true if the Toto were to proceed over 
the water in the style of those vessels, rear- 
ing and pitching, and rolling and plunging. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 179 

If the Toto were to go cavorting over the 
sea, tossed about like a chip, if one side 
were to be lifted till the Toto stood at an 
angle of 135 degrees with the surface of 
the ocean, and then the other side were to 
come up likewise, and so on, till the Toto 
had crossed the ocean, there would be little 
left of the Toto after such a shaking. But 
as the Toto is a broad, level structure, it will 
not be subject to such goings on. Neptune 
can not play with the Toto. When Nep- 
tune's bosom swells, he sometimes creates 
waves a hundred feet broad, but the Toto 
is broader still, and Neptune can never get 
the Toto into the trough of the sea. Ves- 
sels of the present narrow form are lifted 
and lowered, and lifted and lowered, and 
tipped and knocked, and kicked and shoved 
and rolled from side to side between the 
rolling waves for a vessel is narrower than a 
wave ; but the Toto can never get caught 



i8o MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

between the crests of two great billows, for 
its width is so great it will extend across 
nine of them ; and its length, when crossing 
them at right angles, will cover eighteen of 
those ruffles on Neptune's bosom. I do not 
overlook the fact that the outer portion of 
the Toto must be exceedingly stout, as it 
will have to resist a far greater force from 
the oncoming waves than a vessel which is 
lifted by them. The Toto, spreading over 
quite a number of waves, will not be lifted 
by any one, but must meet the full force of 
every coming billow. I admit that in storms 
the beating force of the waves will be tre- 
mendous, for they will dash against the rim 
of the Toto as they dash against the rocky 
shore of the land : and the rim of the Toto 
must be very staunch. But it is only the 
rim which will necessarily be so extremely 
stout ; for the water, after expending its 
force there, and being overcome, will smoothly 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 181 

slide along beneath the level bottom of the 
floating island. That portion of the Toto 
which comes in contact with the water is so 
different in form from that of other vessels, 
that it would hardly be appropriate to call 
it the hull. A large portion of it is a level 
bottom ; the remainder inclines upward around 
the structure, and I call it the rim. That 
broad, level bottom will be subject to very 
little strain, the force of the waves being met 
by that stout rim ; and as it is only the cir- 
cumference, the rim, which will need to be 
constructed of immense strength, and as the 
circumference of an oval figure is less in pro- 
portion than that of a long and narrow one, 
and as the strength of the arch inheres in a 
rim of this oval form, it will be seen that 
the work of giving the Toto its requisite 
strength is assisted by three conditions es- 
pecially favorable to it; so that even that 
feature of the Toto will not be so extreme 



i8 2 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

as might at first appear. And it is only 
when the waves are running very high that 
the Toto's immense power of resistance will 
be tested. When the Toto is moving in 
the direction of the waves, their action will 
not retard its progress, but will aid it. 

The rim of the Toto will be built to a 
sufficient height to prevent the waves from 
breaking over. This breakwater will preclude 
the possibility of a horizontal view of the 
ocean from the pavement of this outer street 
upon the Toto, or from the doors and win- 
dows in the first story of these houses; but 
from the upper stories and from the prome- 
nade deck (the flat roof) a magnificent view 
of the ocean will be had at all times, in fair 
weather or foul ; and on the opposite side 
of the street will be a shelf-platform running 
around the edge of the Toto, built within 
three feet of the top of the rim, as a prome- 
nade for those who desire to approach the 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 183 

nearest to the ocean, and look over upon it 
in its majesty, feeling secure from its clutch 
and interpreting into the language of ro- 
mance what the wild waves are saying. 

And now some ingenious Yankee may 
guess that some inquisitive whale would 
stick his nose up through the bottom of 
the Toto, to investigate matters above him. 
The whale would know better. If not, it 
would simply be an unfortunate attempt, as 
the would-be housebreaking whale would not 
succeed in getting anything more substantial 
than a nosebleed. If any person supposes 
that a structure of this magnitude and im- 
portance would be built in so flimsy a man- 
ner that a big fish would have access where 
he pleased, let him cherish that shrewd sur- 
mise and tell it to the marine monsters 
when the first Toto is ready. Though the 
Toto will not have much iron in its struc- 
ture, it will have sufficient to meet every 



184 MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

demand. Sword-fishes and other marine pests 
will not find the Toto unprepared to meet 
them. 

The attempt to obviate seasickness by con- 
structing a hanging-saloon within a vessel of 
the ordinary size and shape was as futile as 
might have been expected. Any person who 
has observed what motion of the vessel ex- 
cruciated him the most, has perceived that 
the rolling and pitching are not the cause 
of seasickness. The rolling and pitching give 
a swaying motion to the body, which adds a 
trifle to the cruciating influence of the real 
cause of seasickness the upward and down- 
ward motion ! It is that lifting up, up, up, 
and that sinking away of the floor, letting 
us down, down, down, till it begins again to 
rise, rise, rise. This deranges the stomach in 
a manner which no hanging-saloon can avert, 
for the whole ship is moving bodily up and 
^down, carrying up and down with it the 
hanging-saloon. 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. 185 

To be sure, a person in a hanging-saloon 
need not suffer with seasickness, for, if the 
hanging-saloon is furnished in a style appro- 
priate to a hanging-saloon, he will have at 
his disposal the means and the inclination to 
hang himself. 

There will be no hanging-saloon within 
the Toto. The whole structure will maintain 
its level, every head will be level, and no 
one will even hang his head. Blissful enjoy- 
ment of the sunny hours, romantic apprecia- 
tion of the nights beneath that perfect dome 
of stars feelings of every pleasant kind will 
dominate us as we journey on the Toto ; and 
along with every thought will come the sub- 
lime realization This noble structure is 
worthy of the ocean ! 

During the year 1873 tne number of im- 
migrants landing at New York alone was 
267,000, Their journey was very disagreeable. 
They were literally pitched over from Europe. 



1 86 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

If they could have come smoothly, how 
much misery would have been saved them. 
Were there but one such means of con- 
veyance, they all would gladly have taken 
it. The many thousands who went to other 
American ports would have crossed the 
ocean by this one lovely route. And num- 
berless thousands of others would have come, 
for pleasure, or business, or health, or enter- 
prise, or curiosity, or some one of the various 
motives which draw the multitude wherever 
no unpleasant barrier checks them. In the 
fifteen years ending with 1870, more than 
three millions of emigrants arrived in the 
United States. Millions more would have 
come, undoubtedly, had the "bridge" been 
ready which would carry them safely and 
smoothly and easily over. 

The Toto is required. All persons directly 
or indirectly concerned in the existing lines 
of ocean steamers will naturally say, " No," 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 187 

and perhaps extend the word " No " until 
they utter " Nonsense ! " But the vast ma- 
jority of people will admit the necessity of 
at least one worthy carryall for the Atlantic 
Ocean now, to begin with. 

Against the project of building a Toto, 
arguments must be expected, on account of 
that vast pecuniary interest now lodged in the 
flighty host of vehicles bobbing over the 
sea. Do not be surprised, therefore, to hear 
upon every hand the desperate sophistries of 
those whose anxious souls hover over their 
marine risks. Patiently hear whatever falla- 
cies their apprehensions may inspire, sympa- 
thizing with them in there waning fortunes, 
kindly soothing them in their distress, drop- 
ping a tear or two with them in these their 
last hours, comforting them at the approach 
of the inevitable. It is sad. But let not 
their hearts despond; there maybe uses for 
their narrow little steamers; this country is 
full of creeks. 



1 88 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

What an array of figures they will bring 
out to prove their side of the case, to belit- 
tle the importance of the Toto. I anticipate 
those methods of opposition, and take them 
by the forelock, disposing of them now. 
They would surely come. Every great enter- 
prise is opposed. On the same principle that 
every man of any account has enemies, 
every project of any account has opposition. 
Statistics will be brought out to show how 
many more people were killed by railroads 
during one year than were killed by ocean 
steamers ; as though that, if true, were a valid 
argument against having a perfectly safe ferry 
across the Atlantic. The fatality on railroads 
is one thing, and the fatality from ocean 
steamers is another thing ; and to compare 
the two things together, with the purpose of 
keeping down the better to the level of the 
worse, is a style of argument they are wel- 
come to who use it. Were I to reply with 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 189 

similar sophistry, I should retort that the 
number of persons knocked down and killed 
by vehicles in the streets of London exceeds 
the number of people killed by railroads in 
the whole of England. That is a fact, but 
what of it ? Is it an argument against im- 
proved railways, if they could be had ? Or, 
if I should claim that the number of persons 
who die of typhoid fever in London exceeds 
the number run over and killed on the tram- 
ways, would that be an argument against 
having good tramways? There is no con- 
gruity between typhoid fever and tramways, 
nor between the number of deaths by rail- 
ways and the number of deaths by ocean 
steamers. 

Adroitly devised statements will be forth- 
coming from interested parties, directly or in- 
directly, in opposition to the Toto. 
Look out for innuendoes about this time ; 
look out for their motive. Look out for 



1 90 MR. GHIM^S DREAM. 

gross exaggerations. Look out for pleasant 
caricatures. Look out for a numerous fol- 
lowing by envious apes with their suddenly 
conceived figments. Look out for deprecia- 
tion and opposition of every kind ; but, if 
you desire an honest man's opinion, take 
your own when you are next upon the sea. 
And, even then, look out or you will become 
a believer in the Toto. 

The greatest physical need of mankind at 
this time is a Toto. 

So great a project is amazing at the first 
thought, but what great achievement is not ? 
The world is progressing, and every import- 
ant step of its progress is amazing. It is 
almost incredible that the great inventions 
which are now in such common use as to 
be indispensable steam, the printing-press, 
the telegraph are of such recent origin. The 
youth of to-day, growing up with the sight 
of railroads everywhere, would naturally sup- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 191 

pose that railroads had been in vogue for 
ages. What more amazing to him than to be 
told that about fifty years ago there was not a 
railroad on earth ; that the telegraph was not 
used until long afterward ; that they were 
both bitterly denounced by the majority of 
people living when they were introduced ; 
that in 1814 Great Britain had only two 
steam vessels, and now she has nearly four 
thousand ; that an able and prominent mem- 
ber of the British Association declared before 
that body only forty-five years ago that no 
steam vessel could ever cross the Atlantic; 
that another prominent Englishman averred 
that the electric telegraph was impossible, and 
would not be wanted by the people even if it 
were possible ; that the four million sewing- 
machines in the United States had their origin 
as lately as 1853; that 200,000 patents have 
been granted in this new country, and they 
are increasing at the rate of nearly 300 a 



192 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

week; that the round earth was universally 
admitted to be flat until within two or three 
hundred years ; that there are fogies upon it 
now who keep it as flat as they can ; that 
there could be any hesitation in building a 
Toto! 

Look back about fifty years, and see how 
the pull-backs tugged to prevent the railway 
system from starting and moving on. For- 
tunately, the breeching broke, and then they 
had to clear the track ! for the locomotive 
was getting ahead of them ! I extract the 
following from an editorial in that most useful 
and sterling journal of modern times, the 
Scientific American, of the date Oct. 30, 

1875 : 
"On the 2;th of September, 1825, the first 

railroad for conveying passengers was opened 
in England, between the towns of Darlington 
and Stockton. The occasion brought together 
a throng of witnesses, some doubtful, more 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 



193 



scornful, and all perhaps better prepared to 
scoff at the failure which it was confidently 
predicted awaited the bold inventor in his 
daring attempt to make vehicles travel at the 
unprecedented rate of fifteen miles an hour, 
than to congratulate him upon the triumph 
which upset their theories and left them 
questioning the reliability of their senses. It 
is suggestive to contrast this unbelieving as- 
semblage with the gigantic gathering which 
has enthusiastically celebrated the day which 
marks the lapse of the half century since that 
victory over prejudice and ignorance was 
gained. * * * * The question of nui- 
sance became the ground for many of the 
most absurd objections to Stephenson's pro- 
posed use of the locomotive for passenger 
transportation. ' The noise of the machine 
will scare cows so badly that their lacteal 
functions will be arrested;' 'if cows get on 



194 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

the track, how will the engine get out of 
the way ? ' are specimens of this cavilling." 

Only fifty-two years since then ! The rail- 
road now is common, and its entire structure 
is immense. Other vast enterprises also have 
grown up, stunning at the outset, but shortly 
becoming essential elements of civilization. 
Another stunning step in human progress is 
to come. Let it be such a firm step on the 
ocean that the very whales will forget the 
story of Jonah in their wonder. Yet one of 
the commonest things in future years will be 
the Toto. 

It has been well said 

" The folly of one age is the wisdom of 
the next." The New Age. 

The dark ages were not very remote, ac- 
cording to the following, from the Herald 
of the Hub, of the date Oct. 31, 1875 : 

" About seventy years ago the gas lamp 
was introduced in London, by a German 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 195 

named Winsor, and soon afterward the citizens 
lighted Bishopsgate street as an experiment. 
Terrible consequences from this innovation 
were predicted by non-progressive alarmists, 
and these antiquated scarecrows spread the 
notion that the extensive use of gas in Lon- 
don would poison the air, and eventually 
blow up the inhabitants." 

But the opposers of gas received more 
light. There is now plenty of gas in Lon- 
don and Washington and elsewhere. Yet 
there is not a reliable ship on the globe. 

There will be. 

Adorn the Toto little or much, it will be 
lovely. Build the first Toto unadorned, yet 
it will be adorned the most among all the 
floating palaces of the sea, for it will adorn 
itself with a multitude of happy human faces. 
No other kind of adornment equals that! 
And that kind of adornment is not the pre- 
vailing feature of rolling ships. 



196 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Embellish the Toto first or last, the peoples 
of the earth will enjoy it always. Many will 
come from many lands, attracted by its funda- 
mental worth, ornamented or plain. What- 
ever the decoration, the one inherent charm of 
the Toto will be its masculine strength, its 
power to resist the turbulence of that un- 
scrupulous, noisy Neptune. 

Garnish the Toto in due time. Please the 
eye, but come to terms with the stomach first. 
The most fastidious eye is naught so long as 
the most dainty stomach is squeamish. Away 
with glitter until there is substance ! Paint 
nothing until there is something worth paint- 
ing ! It is better to be well on a dray than 
ill in a landaulet. 

The suffering of the past is crying out unto 
us who are living and moulding the future. 
Borne on every breeze around the earth still 
sweeps the groan of every human being who 
has sunk into the ocean depths. Their cries 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 197 

are growing feebler, but the sad vibrations 
linger yet, and will roll on forever. Each im- 
pulsion of despair, so loudly rung out, is be- 
coming fainter every year; yet they are grow- 
ing greater in their number every year. 
Thousands of the saddest wailings have been 
newly added to the cry of drowning thou- 
sands lost in each year gone ; and thousands 
more, of hearts that now are glowing with 
the light of hope, are doomed within a year 
to add their piteous entreaties to the com- 
mon shriek, and keep it rolling on. And so 
it will continue, until mankind shall send a 
worthy answer to the sea, the formidable 
might of Neptune shall be nobly met, and 
on the cruel waters of an ocean maddening 
up into destructive fury shall calmly and 
triumphantly and grandly float a safe and 
comfortable vehicle the Toto. 



198 MR. GHIM >S DREAM. 




CHAPTER III. 

HE foregoing chapter comprises the 
gist of my argument to Mr. Vander- 
bilt and others, in regard to the huge 
enterprise I projected. 

And now we shall see what came of it. 

The building of a Toto began. 

John Roach, the celebrated ship-builder, 

superintended the construction of the first 

Toto. Vanderbilt raised the money, Roach 

furnished the mechanical ability, I concocted 

the idea. We three produced the first Toto. 

Roach was the hardest worked man of the 

trio. All the responsibility rested on him 

from the moment he commenced to build the 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 199 

Toto. Happily, John Roach was born with 
a head equal to the task, though it had to 
apply itself to a work entirely original. For- 
tunately, too, he had a chip of the old block 
with him Henry Roach who proved an 
able assistant. 

A vast deal of thinking had to be done 
before the specifications of the huge struc- 
ture could be determined upon in all their 
details ; but this was accomplished while the 
framework was undergoing construction ; and 
thus the great enterprise went forward with- 
out delay. Time was precious ; so many were 
suffering for want of employment. 

The forthcoming grand embodiment of hu- 
man progress began to take form within a 
few weeks from the time Mr. Roach took 
hold of the enterprise. The actual outline 
of the structure was soon visible, and all its 
parts were seen to be coming together and 
uniting in unmistakable reality. In just five 



200 MR. GffSM'S DREAM. 

years from its inception the monster was 
ready for the sea. 

In the meantime, the enormous amount of 
employment it created gave a stirring impulse 
to mercantile transactions, revived industry in 
all its branches, quickened the circulation of 
money, accelerated the flow of good nature, 
restored the confidence needed among busi- 
ness men, and drove dull times away. Pros- 
perity was restored. Progress was resumed. 
Activity reigned. 

As the time approached for that most 
signal proceeding of this century, the launch 
of the first Toto, preparations were made to 
celebrate the event in a manner befitting its 
magnitude, with a ceremony appropriate to 
the grandeur of the deed itself and the sub- 
limity of its meaning. 

Countless organizations pressed their claims 
for the right of the line in the great civic 
procession which marched from Central Park 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 201 

to the Battery, lest they should be behind, 
unable to get within a mile of the Toto. An 
avalanche of letters poured into Vanderbilt's 
office for weeks beforehand, urgently solicit- 
ing passes within the charmed circle around 
the tower, reserved for the nearest spectators 
of the ceremony. 

As the inauguration of the first Toto was 
an event entirely new in the history of the 
world, it was fitting that the management of 
the long procession on that day should in- 
volve a new feature. Instead of one chief 
marshal, we had two. I induced the most 
famous general of the war to command it first, 
and another noted general to command it last. 
One marshalled the vast host of organizations 
together, and led them forward ; the other 
conducted them back in good order. Thus 
promptness was secured, and discipline main- 
tained. The members of every company were 
notified beforehand precisely where and ex- 



202 MR. GfffM'S DREAM. 

actly when to rendezvous, to march immedi- 
ately. Each organization fell into line with 
the precision of clock-work, moving without a 
moment's stoppage of any one of the numer- 
ous parts. I believed such accuracy attainable, 
and I determined to have it. I selected the 
men who could carry out this idea, and they 
managed the vast array of organizations with 
the foresight required. Grant led them forth, 
and McClellan led them back. 

The passage of the long procession to the 
Toto, the crowding upon it of as many as 
could find a foothold, was followed by the 
dedicatory exercises, in the open air, on the 
widest thoroughfare of the Toto, where a small 
platform had been erected for a few of the 
most prominent actors in the scene. 

I had thought it might add something to 
the pleasure of the time to have the Toto 
dedicated by Free Masons. They are always 
willing to entertain the people by dedicating. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 203 

I love to see them march up on a platform 
in front of us common people, and dedicate 
public buildings, soldiers' monuments, &c., 
according to their ritual, without betraying 
the important secrets of their order. Not 
being a Free Mason myself, I consulted a 
Sir Knight, who referred me to an Eminent 
Commander, who sent me to a Right Emi- 
nent Grand Commander, who directed me to 
the Grand Generalissimo of the United 
States : and through his influence I had all 
the Free Masons of the United States pres- 
ent to dedicate my Toto. This portion of 
the ceremony was opened by the Grand 
Master of the Commandery of New York, 
as follows : 

GRAND MASTER. From time immemorial 
it has been the custom of the Ancient and 
Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted 
Masons, when requested to do so, to conse- 
crate, with ancient forms, such public works 



204 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

as are of patriotic and common interest. 
This structure, therefore, we may consecrate 
in accordance with our law, and in accord- 
ance with ancient usage. Brother Deputy 
Grand Master, what is the proper jewel of 
your office? 

DEPUTY GRAND MASTER. The square. 

GRAND MASTER. What does it teach? 

+ 

DEPUTY GRAND MASTER. To square our 
accounts by the square of virtue, and by it 
we prove our work. 

GRAND MASTER. Have you applied your 
jewel to this structure? 

DEPUTY GRAND MASTER. I have. The 
work is square. The craftsmen have done 
their duty. 

[It seemed to me more round than square. 
Still, I kept quiet. I did not wish to accuse 
a Deputy Grand Master of falsehood.] 

GRAND MASTER. Brother Senior Grand 
Warden, what is the jewel of your office ? 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 205 

SENIOR GRAND WARDEN. The level. 

GRAND MASTER. What does it teach ? 

SENIOR GRAND WARDEN. The equality of 
all men ; and by it we prove our work. 

GRAND MASTER. Have you applied your 
jewel to this structure? 

SENIOR GRAND WARDEN. I have. The 
work is level. The craftsmen have done 
their duty. 

GRAND MASTER. Brother Junior Grand 
Warden, what is the jewel of your office? 

JUNIOR GRAND WARDEN. The plumb. 

GRAND MASTER. What does it teach? 

JUNIOR GRAND WARDEN. To walk up- 
rightly; and by it we prove our work. 

GRAND MASTER. Have you applied your 
jewel to this structure? 

JUNIOR GRAND WARDEN. I have. The 
work is plumb. The craftsmen have done 
their duty. 

["Plumb, is it?" thought I. "The Toto is 



206 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

level, but who would think of saying it is 
plumb?"] 

The Grand Master, striking the Toto three 
times with the gavel, said : 

Well made well proved true and trusty. 
This undertaking has been conducted and 
completed by the craftsmen according to the 
grand plan, in Peace, Harmony and Brotherly 
Love. 

The Deputy Grand Master received from 
the Grand Marshal a vessel of corn, and, 
pouring out the corn, said : 

May the health of the community which 
has executed this undertaking be preserved, 
and their labors be prospered. 

The Grand Marshal presented a cup of wine 
to the Senior Grand Warden, who poured the 
wine down his throat, saying : 

May plenty be vouchsafed to the people of 
this city, and blessings attend all its great un- 
dertakings. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 207 

The Grand Marshal presented a cup of oil 
to the Junior Grand Warden, who poured the 
oil (not down his throat, but into a lamp, for 
it was kerosene oil), saying : 

May this people be preserved in peace, and 
enjoy every blessing. 

The Grand Chaplain then pronounced the 
following invocation : 

May corn, wine, and kerosene oil, and all 
the necessaries of life, abound among men 
throughout the world ; and may this structure 
long remain in its grandeur and strength, to 
traverse the ocean securely; to which noble 
and useful purpose it has now been con- 
secrated. 

GRAND MASTER. Grand Marshal, you will 
make proclamation that this structure has 
been duly consecrated in accordance with an- 
cient form and usage. 

GRAND MARSHAL. In the name of the 
Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of the Com- 



zoS MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

monwealth of New York, I now proclaim that 
the structure here built by the most enterpris- 
ing men now living, for the purpose of carry- 
ing people safely and comfortably across the 
ocean, has this day been found square, level, 
and plumb, true and trusty, and consecrated 
according to the ancient forms of Masons. 
This Proclamation is made from the EAST, the 
WEST, the SOUTH ONCE (trumpet), TWICE 
(trumpet twice), THRICE (trumpet thrice). 
All interested will take due notice thereof. 

The Masonic feature of the dedication of 
the Toto reminded me of a similar ceremony 
at the dedication of the Soldiers' Monument 
on Boston Common, Sept. 17, 1877, and my 
impression at the time that probably no more 
grand and imposing public proceeding than 
this serious pouring of corn and wine and oil 
was occurring on any portion of the earth 
except among the savages. Moreover, that 
calling a round monument square was only 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 209 

exceeded by calling it level. Centuries of 
corroding time may level it ; at present it is 
plumb. My aim is always practical utility, 
and had I been the Grand Master of masonic 
ceremonies on that occasion, I should have 
directed my men in regalia to examine that 
staging full of seats on Black stone Square 
before it fell with all those people on it, thus 
saving five broken legs and several broken 
ribs. There was where the square, and the 
plumb, and so forth were needed, to see if the 
craftsmen had done their duty, before so many 
people were injured by the structure suddenly 
becoming level. Possibly the builders had 
been pouring too much corn, or too much oil, 
but probably too much wine. 

At the dedication of the Toto, after the 
Free Masons had played their part, a gun was 
fired and the American Hymn was sung by 
a million voices in the open air ; a few words 
were spoken by the originator of the Toto; 



2io MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

a selected chorus sang a poem written for the 
occasion by James Russell Lowell ; Vanderbilt 
bowed his acknowledgments to the eulogy it 
contained ; Roach delivered a short address on 
the history of shipbuilding, and especially its 
progress since the building of the steamer Hu- 
ron; a solo was attempted and sung by the 
broken voice of the venerable Jenny Lind, in 
honor of the old memories clinging to this 
spot ; and the next thing on the programme 
was an oration by Senator Roscoe Conkling, 
who delivered the most eloquent address which 
his powerful mind was ever inspired to create. 
In his own superb style, he declared the past 
five years, from 1877 to 1882, the most mem- 
orable five years conceivable in American 
history. And he uttered much besides, in 
every one of those solid sentences of his. 

" You, sir," said he, turning to Ex-President 
Hayes upon his left, " and you, sir," gracefully 
swinging to President Bristow on his right, 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 2 n 

" had the honor to stand at the helm of this 
mighty creation of human foresight in govern- 
ment, called a Republic, when this other 
mighty creation of human foresight, called a 
Toto, had its amazing inception and its glori- 
ous consummation. The deed we perform 
this day will be known in the remotest future 
of the human race, when all the brilliant 
achievements hitherto won shall have van- 
ished from the memory of man, to perish 
utterly. The names of the men who engaged 
in this noble enterprise will quiver on human 
lips a million years to come, as they break 
through their emotion to speak of this one 
huge stride in the march of Progress." 

I have given but the weakest paragraph in 
his powerful address. The whole occupied an 
hour, and was poured into the ears of the 
most remarkable assemblage ever formed. 
Not only the wise, profound, witty and 
famous of this land, but celebrities of all 



212 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

lands, were numerously gathered here, to wit- 
ness the inauguration of so stupendous a 
movement as the movement of the Toto. 
Crowned heads from Europe were bumping 
each other in the dense throng. 

At the conclusion of Senator Conkling's 
address, the stars and stripes ran up the 
Toto's flagstaff over the tower, the Star 
Spangled Banner was sung by square miles 
of people on housetops stretching up Man- 
hattan Island, the procession marched away, 
the ponderous engines were put in motion, 
and the launch of the first Toto began. He 
floated out with the ease and grace of a swan, 
and glided toward the outer bay, to the music 
of countless bands afloat and ashore. 

Such was the confidence beforehand in the 
structure, every detail in its furnishing was 
completed before the Toto was launched, and 
now it was out and bound for England direct. 
The broad escutcheon upon its stern, bearing 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 213 

its proud name of PROGRESS, was now re- 
vealed to the gaze of millions behind, who 
crowded the housetops of New York and 
Brooklyn, on platforms erected up there, and 
loaded the roofs as they had never been 
laden before. Jersey City, too, was densely 
occupied with watchers, and every visible spot 
of earth in the region around was covered 
with human beings intensely interested in the 
sublime event, and clambering up from be- 
hind every obstacle, to peer through the in- 
tervening space and view the wondrous 
scene. The most near-sighted persons, though 
miles away, could see something without an 
opera-glass. 

The coffer-dam had been removed pre- 
viously ; this work required many days. For 
weeks the Toto had been afloat, waiting for the 
ceremonious public launch from its quiet little 
resting-place to the boisterous surface of the 



2i 4 MR. CHIMES DREAM. 

broad ocean. The i/th of September, 1882, 
was the day thus honored. 

Months before the Toto was launched, 
every habitation upon it, every room, cot, 
and lounge, had been engaged at a high pre- 
mium for occupancy during its first passage 
across the Atlantic ; and yet but a small 
fraction of the multitude eager to enjoy this 
splendid novelty could be accommodated. 
These fortunate ones, numbering a hundred 
thousand, were now experiencing the most 
novel hour of their lives, and were accord- 
ingly full of the delight which novelty brings. 
There was ceaseless, jaunty traversing to and 
fro upon the Toto, exploring its upper and 
lower regions for every point of interest, a 
smile of satisfaction adorning every counte- 
nance, the laughter of overflowing good na- 
ture echoing interminably. Life, life, rollick- 
ing life, the highest exhilaration of life, 
abounded. The stupendous structure itself 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 215 

was alive with its forward motion, and the 
stir of its hundred thousand occupants ren- 
dered it seemingly more alive with the molec- 
ular motion of its parts. 

Onward to the Narrows the leviathan was 
steadily conveying us at the rate of six miles 
an hour. 

We passed to the lower bay, and followed 
the channel around near Sandy Hook, out to 
the open sea. And now the special interest 
in the Toto as a sea-going vessel deepened 
and broadened, and was rising to its climax. 
The Toto was soon to meet the supreme 
test. Here were the mighty waves of the 
Atlantic rolling their huge volumes toward 
us. Eternally-moving swaths of water, from 
twenty to forty feet high, were to lose their 
momentum in surging against our stately 
craft. Not merely one of these contentious 
agents of Neptune must be subdued, but 
another, another, and another continually, 



2i6 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

whenever the waves were moving in oppo- 
sition to our course. We glided on toward 
the heavily-rolling surface of the ocean, reach- 
ing it gradually over the lesser billows, and 
watched with the keenest sense the powerful 
efforts made by the element which the Toto 
was built especially to combat. 

Night had fallen around us. The smallest 
hours of the night were passing when this 
trial of strength between two monsters oc- 
curred. It was after midnight but who had 
retired to bed? Not a soul of the hundred 
thousand aboard. The full round moon had 
rolled up and shone down from its topmost 
height, giving to our little city its brightest 
illumination of the night, and was rolling on 
its downward track. 

On board the Toto, enthusiasm had kept 
every person awake and alert ; and on the 
land behind us, was any living person asleep ? 
The miles on miles of the shore of Long 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. 217 

Island while it remained in sight, and the 
square miles of ground behind the shore were 
white with square miles of human faces di- 
rected toward us, imparting to that moonlight 
scene a grandeur of picturesqueness that can 
never die in the memory of those who beheld 
it. We were a hundred thousand, they were 
millions. The sight they saw was grand, the 
sight we saw was sublime. 

Breaking away our gaze from that vast 
splendor behind us, we peered before us, upon 
the heavy and heavier swell of the ocean we 
were to meet and baffle. The waves were not 
running mountains high : they never do ; but 
they were running hillocks high, and further 
out they were running at their highest. A 
lengthy storm had been rousing the great 
deep for days, and had only ceased on the 
morning of the day we started, leaving the 
ocean ruffled by those tremendous undula- 
tions, with crowns of forty feet vertical height 



2i8 MR. GHIM S DREAM. 

from the trough of the sea, rolling now with 
an impetuosity requiring several days of mod- 
erate weather to bring down to the average. 
No more fortunate start could have happened, 
for it enabled us to witness thus early in the 
first trip ever made by the Toto a full test of 
its usefulness. And, moreover, without the un- 
pleasant feature of a storm keeping us indoors. 
We could occupy our streets and house-tops, 
and traverse the Toto conveniently to every 
part. We did. All night long the promenad- 
ing continued, with scarcely any abatement. 
The superb novelty of this great night's expe- 
rience made peripatetics of us all. But while 
the itinerant multitude trod those streets with 
careless step and thoughtless mood, a few 
were closely studying the great problem which 
the Toto was aiding them now to solve. Men 
who had risked millions in this new system of 
ocean navigation were intensely absorbed in 
the prospect. And I, who did not own one 



MR. GHIMS DREAM. 



219 



share, not having a million dollars to purchase 
it, was more deeply interested than all, as I 
had originated the project which jeopardized 
these hundred thousand persons' lives. 

Now in the pilot-house, now at the extreme 
front edge, now looking down over the stern, 
now somewhere else, I was everywhere, dili- 
gently observing ; but as time passed on, and 
we were nearing the heaviest waves we were 
to encounter, I betook myself to the extremest 
position forward, where the billows, if they 
were to sweep us away, should fold me first 
in their deadly embrace. From a similar im- 
pulse, Roach, the builder, wended his way to 
the same fascinating spot ; and Vanderbilt, 
the chief owner, joined us. Other celebrities, 
also, tarried here a while, and then continued 
their meanderings. Bayard Taylor, the travel- 
ler, of course, travelled to this spot, and so- 
journed half an hour. His friend, the witty 
paragrapher, the Danbury News man, had a 



320 MR. GffSM'S DREAM. 

curiosity . to gratify here. George Alfred 
Townsend rushed here repeatedly. The ven- 
erable Peter Cooper, George Law, the brothers 
Stuart, both the Roosevelts, all the Adamses, 
and others, happened along. 

Senator Conkling, arm in arm with George 
William Curtis, paced from the Kernan Hotel, 
to enjoy a sight of the ocean from this vantage 
point when the sea was running high, and 
looked down fraternally on the tumultuous 
waters, which were heaving and contending 
and uniting like angry statesmen. 

These two prominent creators of public 
opinion had latterly vied with each other only 
in their endeavors to be foremost in thunder- 
ing the praises of the magnificent useful enter- 
prise just completed. As they approached our 
little group they were considering the subject 
of ambition. 

" I have often marvelled," said Senator 
Conkling, "that you, my dear George, have 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 221 

i 

always shunned the road leading to Senatorial 
honors." 

George William Curtis, with a smile as deep 
as eternity, replied that he considered the 
scope for exalted influence afforded a journal- 
ist was as much greater and loftier than that 
wielded by a Senator as the flight of a power- 
ful eagle is greater and loftier than that of a 
crow. 

" But nothing personal is meant, my dear 
Roscoe," he added, dimpling. 

" I perceive an additional reason," said 
Conkling. " I notice that the highest am- 
bition invariably defeats itself. It is a curi- 
ous fact worth noticing, that every President 
in modern times, from the election of Lincoln 
till now, has been the very man who cared 
the least to become President. The hardest 
strivers for the place were always baffled, an 
humbler man taken up and lifted to the 
Executive Chair. Ambition is a tumor. I 



222 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

have had mine cut off. I am now the most 
contented public man on the globe." 

"Therefore, my dear Conkling, you are 
the most likely to reach the Presidency 
next." 

" I no longer care for the Presidency. I 
shall not go one step toward it." 

" The more surely it will come to you." 

Other Senators and other public men and 
gifted ladies, passing along, stopped and staid 
a while. 

The waves ran higher, but the Toto main- 
tained its speed of six miles an hour. We 
who were gathered upon its forward edge 
looked over at times for a vertical view of 
the ocean. Standing on the shelf-platform 
which extended around inside, three feet 
below the top of the rim of the Toto, we 
could not look down vertically to the ocean, 
as the rim was four feet thick. But stand- 
ing upon the rim itself, which had a light 



MR. GJTIM'S DREAM. 223 

but firm railing flush with its outer edge, we 
could bend over and peer straight down on 
the rising and falling surface of the mighty 
waters. It was a sight of which I never 
tired. Were the Toto itself rising and fall- 
ing with the water, like all other vessels, no 
such scene would have met our gaze. The 
Toto was still maintaining its steady poise, 
though advancing in a region of gigantic bil- 
lows. Mightier yet were to be reached, and 
we who were most interested remained at this 
point to witness the effect of Neptune's 
fiercest hostility. 

Some persons had imagined that the Toto 
would experience a jarring pulsation through 
it at every encounter with a wave. This 
would be a constant source of annoyance 
throughout the Toto. Theoretically, this 
might happen ; practically, it did not. The 
rim being oval, and nowhere straight, there 
was no heavy broadside shock to thrill 



224 MR. GHIATS DREAM. 

through the structure. Each great wave 
touched the curved outline at one point first, 
and all other points afterward. Thus every 
encounter was gradual. At all times there 
were several billows rolling past the Toto. 
Its steadiness was perfect. And its speed 
exceeded our anticipations. But as we looked 
down vertically from its forward edge, and 
saw the water rising every minute as an ob- 
stacle to its speed, we also saw it falling 
every minute, removing an obstacle ; falling 
away down to as great a depth below the 
average level as it had risen above it, thus 
compensating for its enormous rise a moment 
before. 

It was a curious sight we saw, looking 
down when a wave had lowered the surface 
of the water beneath us, away down to a 
depth of forty feet below where it had been, 
to see that the Toto did not descend along 
with it, but seemed to hang out over that 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 225 

abysm, as though pushing across it. The 
body of the structure extending far back, 
over the width of eighteen of these broad 
billows, held it up in its level attitude, what- 
ever might be the height or depth of a wave 
at any point around it. 

But we were meeting greater and greater 
waves, and we awaited the result of the on- 
set. If one should sweep over us ! 

My confidence, however, was strong. In 
any event, I felt no apprehension regarding 
my own life. If the Toto were swamped, I, 
having brought it into existence, would not 
care to survive the misfortune, even if escape 
to land were possible. I felt as complacent as 
could be. 

"A smile is passing over the face of our 
transcendent young genius," remarked Senator 
Conkling, with a touch of sarcasm in the re- 
mark. " What is it, Ghim ? What facetious 
idea has come ?" 



22 6 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

" A droll notion, Senator, which you your- 
self threw out at the Rochester Convention in 
1877. An ingenuous lady once said she had 
always noticed that when she lived through 
February she lived through the whole year. 
Ha ! ha ! ha ! And now, if the Toto lives 
through the waves we are shortly to meet, 
he will live on through all." 

"I hope he will," remarked the Senator, 
taking out his pocket-knife and cleaning his 
finger-nails by moonlight. 

" Another smile has reached the phiz of our 
Ghim. What is it all about?" queried the 
Danbury News man, at whom I happened to 
be looking. 

" A reminiscence of your own," said I. " I 
learned from the columns of your highly in- 
fluential and useful journal (ahem !) about 
a case where a train of cars ran off the track 
and were smashed to pieces, when a fat old 
lady who had never travelled on a railroad be- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 227 

fore, and was bound for Stamford, crawled out 
of the wreck and inquired ' Is this Stamford ?' 
' No, this is a catastrophe,' was the reply. 
' Well, if this ain't Stamford, I hadn't oughter 
got off here,' So now, if we meet waves too 
big, there will be a catastrophe, and there 
will be a hundred thousand of us folks, who 
never travelled this way before, wriggling 
about in the water, thinking we ' hadn't 
oughter got off here.' " 

The moon was descending, the waves were 
rising. But at 3 o'clock the climax of the 
situation was reached. Captain Garrett, who 
commanded the vessel, came down from the 
pilot-house and informed us that the Toto 
was traversing the highest waves it would 
ever encounter. Its test as a sea-going ves- 
sel had now been fully and successfully met ! 

Captain Garrett hastened back to the top 
of the tower, and blew five screeches from 
the whistle. A great event was now to 



228 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

occur, in honor of the Toto's complete 
success. 

The tower was built upon arches over the 
central thoroughfare, which bore the name of 
Indiana Avenue. Fronting on one side of 
Indiana Avenue was the Voorhees Hotel, 
by far the largest in the city. The Voorhees 
Hotel was long and narrow; one end was 
painted yellowish red. This hotel extended 
the entire length of the Toto, minus the 
width of the street at each end. All the cross 
streets were spanned by the building itself, 
just above the first story. The second story, 
in front, comprised one long dining-room, 
seventeen hundred feet in length, and thirty 
feet in width. In this immense dining-room 
was now to be held the greatest banquet the 
world had ever witnessed or ever dreamed of. 
The invitations were issued a year before 
hand; the moment had come, the whistle 
announced it ; and now the greatest of earth 



MR. GHIJ^S DREAM. 229 

from inventors down to monarchs, were gath- 
ering in response to the signal which told 
them the time had arrived for rejoicing and 
feasting and speech-making over the triumph- 
ant career of the Toto. Such a banquet earlier 
would have signified nothing. Not until the 
new structure had met its enemy in the full 
tide of his strength, and successfully passed 
the terrific ordeal, could that mighty fact 
be appropriately celebrated. Now we could 
do it, and with a gusto. Hunger was begin- 
ning in earnest to press its claims. Many of 
us had eaten nothing, cared for nothing to 
eat, in the heightening excitement of all the 
hours since we started. But now the climax 
had come, and henceforth the intense novelty 
of it all must wane. 

Preparations for the banquet had been com- 
pleted in all their details. The arrangements 
had been specified to each invited guest weeks 
before. Every one knew precisely the spot to 



2 3 o MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

go to, the chair to occupy, in the whole vast 
array. At the welcome sound of the steam- 
whistle, thirty-six hundred persons moved with 
joyful steps toward the Voorhees Hotel. All 
sat down together in one room, and ate their 
fill. 

It was a notable assembly, embracing the 
leading inventors of all nations, the greatest 
authors of every tongue, the most famous 
statesmen of the world, brilliant American 
sovereigns, and every royal head on the globe. 
Regarding the latter, all, all had been drawn 
by the magic of this mighty revolution in 
commercial affairs. In the speech-making 
which attended this banquet, their royal high- 
nesses let out the secret of their unanimous 
attendance here ; America was bearing away 
the palm for enterprise; no head of a mari- 
time nation could tranquilly rest upon its 
pillow at home during such an august hour as 
this ; all were here to observe with their own 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 231 

eyes, and to plan the immediate construction 
of Totos in their own waters. 

The ruler of Japan, even the ruler of China, 
sat down at this board. The enterprising 
Dom Pedro, of Brazil, would not have missed 
the occasion for half his kingdom. Ralph 
Waldo Emerson emerged from retirement, and 
enjoyed this stirring event at the Voorhees 
Hotel. The " tall Sycamore of the Wabash " 
of course, graced the occasion with his flowing 
locks and flowing accents. 

Ben Butler and Ben Hill took seats near 
each other, with only the Queen of England 
between. 

The Sultan of Turkey sat near the Czar 
of Russia, with Her Majesty Queen Isabella 
for meat to the great sandwich. 

The beetling brow of Mark Twain threw 
more colossal majesty on the scene, and his 
long-drawn tones lengthened the humorous 
feeling his droll ideas aroused. 



232 MR. GJflM'S DREAM. 

The merry little old doctor, Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, took out a manuscript when called 
up, and read a chirruping poem. With his 
usual felicitousness of expression, he touched 
upon various persons present. The greatest 
roach he had ever come across while eating 
was John Roach, the builder of the Toto. 
The man of progress who had put himself 
furthest in the van was Vanderbilt. The fact 
that the Toto existed, and was not a mere 
whim, was due to one here who persisted, 
which his name it was Ghim. 

The rollicking little round Sunset Cox 
climbed up into a chair betwixt Harriet 
Beecher Stowe and Clara Louise Kellogg, 
and set tables roaring by his youthful exu- 
berance. 

The gifted Mary Clemmer, directly oppo- 
site, snugly ensconced between Max Stra- 
kosch and the Khedive of Egypt, exulted in 
her superb opportunity for studying human 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 233 

nature. Not a face within range escaped her 
keen scrutiny. 

The Princess of Wales, with Whitelaw Reid 
on one side, and Bret Harte on the other, 
enjoyed the occasion royally. 

The talented Olivia, and the queenly Olive 
Logan, and the ferocious General Logan, and 
the vigorous Clarence Cook, and the mother 
of us all, Mrs. Livermore, were mingled with 
the kingly Grand Duke of Russia, the ardent 
Gambetta, the smooth Disraeli, the earnest 
Grace Greenwood, and the bewitching Phoebe 
Cozzens. 

The Empress Eugenie was sometimes smil- 
ing in a Frenchy chat with the Hon. Matt 
Carpenter upon her right, and sometimes se- 
riously listening to the King of Dahomey 
upon her left. 

Cyrus W. Field and Kate Field and 
James T. Fields, and various Fields, were 
present. 



234 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Far too numerous to mention were the 
many others who attended this banquet. 

The decoration of the room was gorgeous. 
The arrangement of tables was transverse, 
except at the ends of the room, where a few 
tables ran lengthwise, to afford every person 
the best opportunity attainable for seeing 
many. But as no one could see all, or hear 
everything, imaginary lines divided the whole 
into three groups of twelve hundred persons 
each, except when some stentorian voice 
gained the ears of the whole assembly. 

An incident occurred in "our set," of small 
importance to the multitude, but of tremen- 
dous importance to me. Ik Marvel, deliver- 
ing a little speech in eloquent Saxon, 
complimenting me, alluded to the Toto as 
my Toto. Replying, I mentioned the fact 
that not a single iron rod or creosoted stick 
of timber, or even a ten-penny nail in the 
whole structure belonged to me ; that the 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 235 

shares were a million dollars each, and I did 
not own a share. 

Vanderbilt suddenly arose. 

" Ladies and gentlemen," said he, " our 
young friend's remarks move me to say a 
few words right here, and perform a deed 
right here which I planned for a future 
occasion when I could see him alone. 
I am too impatient now to await that time. 
You are all aware that I own fifty-one of 
the hundred shares representing the value of 
the Toto, while he who virtually created this 
entire structure owns nothing of it, alas ! and 
is poorer than the poorest of you. I now 
present to him, as a trifling reward for his 
thoughtful services in behalf of suffering hu- 
manity, by conceiving and carrying forward so 
gigantic an enterprise as the building of the 
first Toto, a million dollars' worth of its stock." 

As soon as I could be heard I replied, 
protesting against such a squandering of 



236 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

property. It would leave Vanderbilt with 
only fifty shares, not enough for a controlling 
interest if all the other stockholders ever 
united against him. " Besides," said I, " I 
shall not be penniless all my life. Mr. Stuart 
here has willed me his entire interest in the 
Toto. If I should survive him, there is four 
million dollars' worth " 

"What!" exclaimed Vanderbilt. "Am I to 
be outdone by one less able ? I will be 
sweeter to you than the sugar refiner. I 
present you five million dollars' worth this 
day. I " 

" Halt, Mr. Vanderbilt. Before you go 
higher still, I accept your noble present, lest 
you give your whole fortune away. I am 
eternally obliged. Please imagine me ever- 
lastingly thanking you for your generous im- 
pulse. It shall not be in vain. Circum- 
stances have taught me the full value of 
money, and the highest use of it. The in- 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 237 

come of those five millions will be well ap- 
propriated, you may depend upon it. Your 
unparallelled " 

" Enough ! enough !" cried Vanderbilt "It 
seems to me I see our friend John B. Gough 
among us. As we are travelling by water, 
I am sure we shall all be delighted to hear 
remarks from a wet water man, upon water 
in general and water in particular." 

Mr. Gough responded : 

" Nothing inspires a man like cold water 
on a cold morning. It's a fatal mistake to 
drink anything else. I never drink anything 
else except by mistake. In the exhilaration 
prevailing among these thiity-six hundred 
persons feeding their tape-worms together, 
no wonder some errors are committed. I 
see a cold water man has taken wine by 
mistake, and feels bigger than a Toto. If he 
makes the same mistake repeatedly, he will 
wind up with the grave error of rolling un- 



238 MR, GHIM'S DREAM. 

der the table. When a man drinks dry 
Sillery wine instead of wet water, he drinks 
contamination to his soul ! The past forty 
years I've drunk water continually. I have 
travelled widely, and always on water. I 
mean as a beverage. In the other regard, 
water has been too strong to suit my 
stomach. On land my stomach travelled 
comfortably, on water uncomfortably ; and 
there is more water than land. I shall never 
cease to forget how I staggered over the 
water the first time I went across, to enjoy 
life in London. But now we're travelling 
like a duck ! A big duck. The Toto has 
dignity. It takes to the ocean like a duck 
to a pond, and preserves its stateliness like a 
swan. Governor Swan of Maryland, will 
you have the goodness to favor us with a 
pantomime ?" 

Gov. Swan replied with gesticulations until 
his voice came up, when all heard and were 



MR. GHIAPS DREAM. 239 

fascinated. When he was fairly under way, 
he took occasion to retort upon Gough with 
a piece of pleasantry, but Gough had vanished. 
He had not rolled under the table. He was 
not on board the Toto. But Helen Potter 
was. She had personated Gough as well as 
he could personate himself. 

Had this banquet been a small affair, only 
one sex would have been privileged to enjoy 
it. But the event it commemorated was 
great, and all the proceedings it inspired 
were comprehensive. The Toto was broad ; 
no small or one-sided celebration would have 
honored it. 

Here were female thinkers and writers of 
weight. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe irradiated 
this banquet hall with her bright presence, 
and let fall impressive words when her turn 
came. Other profound speakers of her gender 
moved us likewise with their deep utterances ; 
and more of her sex were here to devour 



240 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

truffles and speeches, and allow their own 
sweet voices to be heard in chat. 

Judge Bingham of Ohio was present, 
crammed with materials for a ready-made 
speech. He was called upon. Commencing 
in moderate style, as usual, growing warmer 
and fiercer, as usual, he became impetuous 
and furious, he gesticulated with irresistible 
force, he cracked the table with his knocks, 
he would have levelled an oak at every 
thrust, he projected thunderbolts faster and 
faster, he fixed his eyes on imaginary foes, 
he glared unutterable defiance over his eagle 
beak, and swept like a hurricane to his 
conclusion, winding up as follows : 

" Fancy a far-away observer of the earth, 
another astronomical Proctor, standing now 
on the star Sirius, seventy-five millions of 
millions of miles from Boston. He has been 
looking off into the realms of ether, to pene- 
trate as far as instruments can fathom the 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 241 

mighty mass of yet unmeasured substance 
which infinite space contains. His reason 
tells him that all matter has its limits, al- 
though his furthest measurements of the 
whole are vain. The lengthening reaches of 
his straining vision through his telescopes are 
futile, and he draws in now within the scope 
of easy observation, and looks upon the earth. 

His scrutiny of orbs that roll in legions upon 



legions within the radius of octillions of non- 
illions of miles swept by his colossal glass for 
the daily news of the world, his discoveries of 
the great achievements wrought upon every 
inhabited globe in the whole domain he scans, 
his study of the vast works of the Creator's 
creatures carrying forward the work of crea- 
tion, fill his mind each day with a still more 
sublime conception of the possibilities of prog- 
ress, and he contemplates the future of the 
universe with an expansion of soul which is 
inspiring until he turns his telescope to view 



242 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

the earth, and then he bursts out laughing. 
He always laughs when he looks upon the 
curious little globe called the earth, and thinks 
of the ludricrous incongruities he perceives 
there ; the people suffering all manner of evils 
and not using means to remedy their troubles, 
not even seeming to know that their difficul- 
ties can be remedied. It convulses him with 
mirth every time he turns his ten-mile tele- 
scope from its grand review of the doings of 
numberless gigantic and densely populated 
globes massed before his telescope as he sweeps 
the boundless depths of abysmal space to 
take in even that infinitesimal fraction of the 
remote star multitudes comprising the world 
to cover the earth with his glass and see 
human beings strenuously insisting that the 
welfare of the world depends upon the dem- 
ocratic party coming into power! and other 
human beings crazy over the idea that the 
world will go to wreck and ruin if the repub- 



MR. GHUrS DREAM, 243 

lican party does not continue to hold the 
helm ! He thinks of the world, of the im- 
mense regions of populous globes through 
which his vision has been roaming to the 
extent of his powerful glass, and now as he 
covers the earth with one eye he looks at the 
rolling seas with their twenty thousand toss- 
ing chips called ships, and he grins with 
irresistible fervor as he contemplates these 
millions and millions of human beings 
with their millions and millions of dollars, 
and their millions and millions of horse 
powers connected with almost every con- 
ceivable form and variety of machinery 
to assist them in great works, and yet no 
great works accomplished in this department 
of human activity. Floating out upon those 
bobbing and swaying and lurching and 
pitching and rolling little things that were 
built to traverse oceans with the hope of 
their living through the ordeal, he sees them 



244 MR. GJffM'S DREAM. 

sometimes getting across, and sometimes 
getting in and going down thousands and 
thousands of healthy people every year 
gulped down by old Neptune, and yet their 
survivors never seem to think of improving 
on such a wholesale method of human 
slaughter oh, it is too, too funny ! and he 
laughs and laughs at such ridiculous doings 
until he can catch his breath and say ' Ah, 
Proctor, you are teaching the people lessons 
of distance, but when will they apply them ? 
You have expanded their minds by telling 
them how many millions of millions of miles 
they would have to walk to reach the nearest 
fixed star, as there is no safe conveyance in 
that direction ; but when will they learn that 
there is no safe conveyance across their own 
water, and that a really safe one would only 
need to be one fifty-four millionth of a mil- 
lionth of the length of the distance between 
them and the very nearest star!' Again 



MR. GHIATS DREAM. 245 

imagine that far-away observer, our gifted 
Proctor's astronomical cousin, seventy-five 
million million times removed, lifting his 
ten-mile glass once more to that little speck 
of the world called the earth, which has 
always been of such tremendous importance 
in the cosmic plan that it has for ages 
maintained its position in the very centre of 
the universe, graciously allowing the vast 
wheel called the Milky Way to revolve 
around it imagine that looker-on raising his 
glass in a smiling mood to see if the people 
of earth continue as short-sighted as ever, 
that he may have another good laugh with 
his Sirius companions as he tells them how 
the folks in the middle of the universe are 
doing their best to stir up political tempests 
over absolute trifles, how they are going 
stark mad in every civilized country so fast 
that thousands have to be penned up; how 
the people in general are possessed with an 



246 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

insane desire for gaudy appearances, regard- 
less of convenience or comfort or health or 
peace of mind or anything else that is 
wholesome and useful ; how they fill them- 
selves with the rankest of stinking fluids in 
order that their nerves may be wrought up 
to such a pitch of excitement that they will 
enjoy a hundred years of life to-day lest 
they die to-morrow; how they put all 
their force into dazzling displays of tran- 
sient strength, and are growing incapable 
of steady and long-continued exercise of 
power, whether personal or governmental ; 
how they have grown to such numbers and 
yet have not .increased the knowledge of 
their own united strength to its real limits ; 
how they have always tried their wretched 
best to be content with gilded misery in 
their travels on the ocean; how they devote 
their attention to innumerable quick little 
efforts at building bobbing baubles of ships, 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 247 

instead of broadly and serenely and surely 
combining and putting together a structure 
of sterling strength and steady usefulness; 
how they are always going through a host of 
other just as laughable little antics for the 
amusement of observers in the heavens; how 
he has refrained from glancing at the earth 
for a year or two, as he has been too busy 
in studying the grand achievements of other 
orbs, and he never did discover anything on 
earth of importance commensurate with its 
people's capabilities of progress ; how he 
feels a touch of dyspepsia after his grave 
labors in grander fields, and will now take a 
laugh for the good of his health by turning 
his telescope toward the earth, and shaking 
up his torpid liver over the comic attempts 
of those queer folk, who are always tugging 
to make progress in opposite directions at 
the same time ; how he surmises that the 
earth was made for the purpose of amusing 



248 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

the rest of creation by its people's frenzied 
efforts to be happy ; how appropriate that 
Boston was located on the earth, to spread 
ideas of breadth and freedom and progress 
among the inhabitants of a globe of such 
importance, and keep the narrow minds of 
earth's people from collapsing altogether ; 
how an observer from Sirius cannot but 
smile at the people of earth for regarding 
all the immense orbs in space as their little 
stars, and alluding to one which is 150,000,- 
ooo times the size of the earth as their star 
Sirius ; how remarkable it is that the cos- 
mographic plan of the universe is such that 
the earth is the nucleus of creation, and the 
cosmogony of the entire immeasurable 
amount has its beginning and ending upon 
that atom of the whole, by which its people 
are highly favored, republicans as well as 
democrats; how strange it is that the in- 
habitants of a globe of such importance have 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 249 

been so long at the mercy of their own sea, 
when they could journey over it in absolute 
security if they would navigate it in the 
right way, with vehicles of the right form 
and size ; how those comically bobbing 
things called ships will stir up his risibilities 
now after he has not seen them for a year or 
two, or anything else quite so ridiculous ; how 
he will now what ! he sees on the Atlantic 
Ocean at last the very thing they have 
always needed a steady and safe and ad- 
mirable structure the Toto! Earth is im- 
proving. Man is progressing. Four cheers 
for the author of the Toto I" 

Another impetuous orator, General Joseph 
R. Hawley, who stood at the head of the 
vast Centennial enterprise, and had thrown 
his whole soul into this vast enterprise also, 
was afforded the opportunity to pour out his 
pent up flood of enthusiasm. The mention 
of his name in connection with the word 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Centennial brought him to his feet with a 
jump and a declamation : 

"Centennial! That magic word united 
forty million minds on one great thought, 
and drew the enterprising thousands from all 
lands. They came to view a nation that had 
risen in a hundred years unto colossal 
strength, a nation that has proved itself a 
prodigy among its rivals; and they came to 
learn the secret of its wonderful prosperty. 
No other nation upon earth has thriven in 
the same proportion; and what has been the 
means of its magnificent and sumptuous 
success? This country's greatest measure of 
success is due to inventors. Their inspiration 
caused its rapid rise ; their inspiration is lift- 
ing it apace; their inspiration has carried it 
already up to such a height of practical 
achievement that politicians grovelling below 
are bewildered and lost in their endeavors to 
comprehend the situation. Politicians are 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 251 

behind the times, and are groping in shadows. 
Invention is the spirit of the age ! before 
whose solid works, and under whose more 
potent and enduring influence, all petty con- 
troversies upon special modes of government 
are passing away, as the morning remnants 
of a fevered dream are swept into oblivion at 
the rising of the sun in his usefulness and 
greatness and progress! Political animosities 
fade, and die, and are forgotten. Invention 
lives ! and grows ! and in its massive embodi- 
ments of progress it looks on down upon 
the ages as they come, plainly discernible, 
unmistakable, tangible, while the constant 
political fret, and the periodical tempests over 
paltry details of human administration sink 
into their forever dwindling importance. In- 
vention soars above the plane of ephemeral 
partisan thought ; out of its very castles in 
the air it builds substantial abodes for the 
better accommodation of man; up to these 



252 MR. GJffM'S DREAM. 

created improvements the genius of invention 
lifts the human race ! Invention alone has 
builded Civilization, the entire superstructure 
and every detail within it. In a hundred 
years what marvels were added ! Another 
hundred years began. What are to be its 
issues ? Out of this cycle of a hundred years 
will arise undoubtedly some stupendous 
works to illumine the pages of its history, 
to aid the promotion of human advancement 
to the end. What shall they be ? The 
answer slumbers in minds unborn, with inter- 
vening generations to rear impressive splen- 
dors upon the foundation of the past. When 
the hundred years now begun shall have 
rolled away, and again America looks 
proudly back, what happier reminiscence then 
can arise than that this advancing nation 
signalized the beginning of its new centennial 
period by the beginning of a new enterprise 
by which it stepped forth suddenly one 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 253 

sweeping stride beyond all other nations! 
that the Totos dotting every ocean had their 
commencement in the plan of 1877, tne fi rst 
year of our new one hundred years !" 

He proceeded. He was followed by John 
L. Swift, John Wetherbee, and other men of 
enthusiasm, some of them witty fulminators 
of trifles, yet all earnest believers in progress. 

This great occasion of feasting passed 
through its stately stages to its close. It was 
no symposium, but an orderly banquet of 
clear-headed, far-seeing men and women, pro- 
foundly impressed by the fact that a record of 
this event would glow in after ages upon one 
of the brilliant leaves of history. 

Weariness at last fell upon all. Sleep com- 
plained of neglect, and would not be put off 
longer. The lateness of the hour, too, con- 
spired with the imagination to lay a heavy 
hand on these tired bodies, and put out their 
lights for renewal. It was time. The night 



254 MR. GHIM^S DREAM. 

was wholly gone; the gas was becoming 
feeble ; the sun of a new day had swept across 
the ocean, and was casting his early nays 
through eastern windows, dimming all lights 
that were lesser, subduing the brilliance of 
nocturnal display, and smothering the intense 
animation which all night long had attended 
the moonlight vigils without and the banquet- 
ing within. It was ended, and thirty-six 
hundred persons dragged themselves away to 
their beds, to sleep a day and a night. 

Before I retired to rest, I travelled up to 
the top of the Toto's tower once more, to 
take one last fond look around upon the giant 
I had brought into being; and I' felt a resist- 
less exaltation of pride, and a pardonable 
thrill of vanity, in view of the broad measure 
of usefulness which the great work embodied, 
and the limitless ramifications of its influence 
for good upon industries in every civilized 
nation. 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 255 

Descending from the tower in deep 
thought, and moving whithersoever the im- 
pulse of the moment led me, I soon found 
myself again in that fascinating spot at the 
extreme edge of the Toto forward, my hand 
upon the railing on the rim, and looking 
steadfastly down from this firm resting-place, 
to view the :mad waters in their everlasting 
rise and .fall,. How many minutes or hours 
I remained over this enchaining spectacle I 
know not, but I drew myself away at: last, 
with a lingering look of triumph at the mon- 
ster I had subdued, and a smile. of derisidn 
at his impotence :in rolling volumes of inert 
matter toward me and my hundred thousand 
people. .Let Neptune act his fiercest, a 
leviathan of my own fashioning was ever suc- 
cessfully contending with him, pressing him 
back, pressing ever majestically forward. 

I retired at last to my room and my 
couch, and fell into my deepest slumber. 



256 MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 

Oh, what a sleep ! Oh, what an awaken- 
ing ! Did I arise inspired with a proud recol- 
lection of that great day and night's ex- 
perience? I arose to a disenchantment of it 
all. The whole was a dream. There had 
been no procession, no dedication, no twins, 
no banquet. There was no grand Voorhees 
Hotel upon the Toto. Alas ! there was 
no Toto. There was nothing but a dream. 
Was there a condition of hard times oppress- 
ing the people ? Surely, that notion must 
have been a dream ; for why would a great 
nation of intelligent people allow it? With 
the benefits of modern appliances, the stores 
of accumulated knowledge, the development 
of intellect in the heightening advance of 
civilization, why would they as a nation not 
the poor alone, but all suddenly become 
bewildered, cease to progress, fail to render 
their vast accumulations profitable, and suffer 
hard times? Would a Congress and a 



MR. GHIM'S DREAM. 257 

people narrow their gaze to a scrutiny of 
trivial objects, and let the gigantic cause of a 
difficulty stand before them so large as to be 
unnoticed? Then there might be hard times. 
But that is incredible. Could there be a 
Congress and a people suffering and not 
tracing their misfortune to its source ? Labor- 
saving inventions, in vast numbers, work vast 
changes in industry, enabling us to accomplish 
results which in former times would be simply 
astounding. It would be a mythical Congress 
and a mythical people who would overlook 
the sweeping drift of invention ; or see it and 
deny its logical and inevitable tendency ; re- 
fuse to adapt themselves to it, and accomplish 
what they might ; pass by a fact of such trans- 
cendent importance, and glare at something 
petty ; attribute to dollars instead of machines 
a diminution of manual employment ; deplore 
the number of tramps, yet reduce the number 
of government employees; abandon public 



258 MR. GHIM'S DREAM* 

works while private enterprise flags, .dis- 
couraged by the lack of government enter- 
prise ; endeavor to save a few dollars to the 
treasury while millions are yearly lost in the 
idleness fostered by that policy ! An intelli- 
gent nation would not do that, for that would 
create hard times. So there are no hard times ; 
it must be a dream. 



THE END. 



1878 



1878. 





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MARY J. HOLMES* WORKS. 



i -TEMPEST AND SUNSHINE. 

*. ENGLISH ORPHANS. 

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3,15. -EDNA BROWNING. 
17. EDITH LYLE. 



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"Mrs. Holmes' stories are universally read. Her admirers are numberless. 
She is fa many respects without a rival in the world of fiction. Her character* 
;;e always life-like, and she makes them talk and act like human beings, subject 
to the same emotions, swayed by the same passions, and actuated by the same 
Thrives whkh arc common among men and women of every day existence. Mrs. 
Holmes is very happy in portraying domestic life. Old and young peruse her 
-tcries with great delight, for she writes in a style that all can comprehend." 
Mew York Weekly. 

"Mrs. Holmes stories are all of a domestic character, and their interest, 
therefore, is not so intense as if they were more highly seasoned with sensational- 
ism, but it is f fa healthy and abiding character. Almost any new book which her 
publisher might choose to announce from her pen would get an immediate and 
general reading. The interest in her tales begins at once, and is maintained to 
the close. Her sentiments are so sound, her sympathies so warm and ready, 
an-! her knowledge of manners, character, and the varied incidents of ordinary 
lite is so thorough, that she would find it difficult to write any other than an 
excellent tale if she were to try it" Bottom Banner. 

" Mrs. Holmes is very amusing ; has a quick and true sense ot hcmor, a 
sympathetic tone, a perception of character, and a familial, attractive style, 
pleasantly adapted to the comprehension and the Uste of that large class U 
itrrrican readers for whom fashionable novels and ideal fantasies have no 
-karm." Htttry T. Tuckerman. 



The Tohimes are ah handsomely printed and bound in doth, cold 
uaywhqa, and sent by mail, jottage free, on receipt of prire [f 1.30 each]. I-} 

Q. W CARLETON ft CO., Publisher^ 

Madison Square^ New Ytrk. 



CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS. 



A New Edition. 

.Among the many editions of the works of this greatest tf 
fcnglish Novelists, there has not been until now one that entirely 
satisfies the public demand, Without exception, they each have 
some strong distinctive objection, either the form and dimensions 
of the volumes are unhandy or, the type is small and indistinct 
or, the illustrations are unsatisfactory or, the binding is poor or, 
the price ts too high. 

An entirely new edition is now, however, published by G. W. 
Carleton & Co. of New York, which, it is believed, will, in every 
respect, completely satisfy the popular demand. It is known as 

"Carleton' New Illutrated Edition." 

COMPLETE IN 15 VOLUMES. 

The size and form is most convenient for holding, the type fa 
entirely new, and of a cleat and open character that has received the 
approval of the reading community in other popular works. 

The illustrations are by the original artists chosen ly Charles 
Dickens himself and the paper, printing, and binding are of an 
attractive and substantial character. 

This beautiful new edition is complete in 15 volumes at the 
extremely reasonable price of $1.50 per volume, as follows : 

I. PICKWICK PAPERS AND CATALOGUE. 

2. OLIVER TWIST. UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

3. DAVID COPPERFIELD. 

4. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. ITALY AND AMERICA. 

5. DOMBEY AND SON. 

6. BARNABY RUDGE AND EDWIN DROOD. 

7. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. 

8. CURIOSITY SHOP AND MISCELLANEOUS. 

9. BLEAK HOUSE. 
IO. LITTLE DORRIT. 
II. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. 
12. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. 
13. CHRISTMAS BOOKS. TALE OF TWC CITIES. 

4. SKETCHES BY WOZ AND HARD TIMES. 
15. CHILD'S ENGLAND AND MISCELLANEOUS. 

The first volume Pickwick Papers contains an alphabetical 
catalogue of all of Charles Dickens' writings, with their psitioas 
in the volumes. 

This edition is sold by Booksellers, everywhere and single speci- 
men copies will be forwarded by mail, postage free, on receipt of 
price, $1.50, by 

G. W, CARLETON & CO,, Publishers, 

Madison Square, New York. 



